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- [00:00]
Leo Laporte
It's time for Twit this Week in Tech. Kathy Gellis, my attorney, is here. She's actually a Supreme Court expert. Also from Consumer Reports, Nicholas De Leon. We will talk about a couple of very important Supreme Court decisions at the very last minute that will affect the Internet. We'll also talk about the strange case of the Indian engineer who took more than 40 jobs in Silicon Valley at the same time. And why that one billion dollar fine against Cox could cost you your Internet access. All that and more coming up next on Twit podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week at Tech, episode 1039, recorded Sunday, July 6, 2025.
- [00:57]
Nicholas De Leon
Mmm.
- [00:58]
Leo Laporte
Ham Shack. It's time for Twit this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news and what a week it has been. In the words of John Oliver, I should be going like this. What a week it's been. We say hello to Kathy Gellis from Tech Dirt, longtime contributor. It looks like she's sitting in the dark, but it's because it's such a beautiful day on the bay. The sun is shining in. Hi, Kathy.
- [01:23]
Kathy Gellis
Hello.
- [01:24]
Nicholas De Leon
You know what?
- [01:25]
Leo Laporte
You're looking great. Your health is good, I think.
- [01:30]
Kathy Gellis
Maybe not.
- [01:31]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, I'm sorry to hear that.
- [01:33]
Kathy Gellis
Yeah. Well, I've been swimming though, so I look hardly in tan. But.
- [01:38]
Leo Laporte
Did you swim in the bay or in a pool?
- [01:41]
Kathy Gellis
I've been. I have. I've done the bay, but. But lately it's been a pool.
- [01:45]
Leo Laporte
My son used to live. It was your neighbor out there in the. In the houseboat zone. But he's moved to New York City where there is no water. So.
- [01:55]
Kathy Gellis
Have you checked a map?
- [01:57]
Leo Laporte
Well, there's water, but you know, it's funny when you're in the mid. When you're in midtown. Actually, he's in the village. The water seems far away. It's not. It's not far at all.
- [02:07]
Kathy Gellis
I was there and I walked along the whole town and I took the ferries. There's. You can have a whole day just on the water in New York.
- [02:14]
Leo Laporte
Amazing.
- [02:14]
Kathy Gellis
It's an island.
- [02:15]
Leo Laporte
Yes, it's an island. Who knew? Also hello to Mr. Nicholas de Leon, senior electronics reporter at Consumer Reports. He's in the desert. Hello.
- [02:25]
Nicholas De Leon
I'm in the desert. There is no water whatsoever to speak of. Although we are in monsoon season, so we do get pretty torrential downpours every now and then.
- [02:36]
Leo Laporte
You told me you love that.
- [02:38]
Nicholas De Leon
It's really cool. I've gotten. I just Bought a Fujifilm camera a few months ago. I've gotten some really, really nice pictures, in my opinion.
- [02:45]
Leo Laporte
Where do you post them? Anywhere.
- [02:47]
Nicholas De Leon
Just my Instagram. I mostly use them for the Apple TV screensaver.
- [02:51]
Leo Laporte
To be honest, on our TV set.
- [02:54]
Nicholas De Leon
A very small audience for these photos. Yeah.
- [02:57]
Leo Laporte
What's your Insta handle? I probably follow you, but maybe not for this one.
- [03:01]
Nicholas De Leon
It's Day Leon photo. And Day Leon is spelled D A Y L A Y O W N.
- [03:10]
Leo Laporte
Because you're trying to confuse the hell out of me.
- [03:12]
Nicholas De Leon
I'll email it to you guys later.
- [03:13]
Leo Laporte
No, I got it. Day lay O W N. It's like your own photos.
- [03:18]
Nicholas De Leon
Yes, Dalio, that's how you.
- [03:19]
Leo Laporte
There it is. I see you. I see you. Look at that. You got the XT50, huh? How do you like it?
- [03:26]
Nicholas De Leon
I like it a lot. I mean, I'm not a camera guy, you know, I haven't really messed with cameras in, like, 20 years.
- [03:30]
Leo Laporte
Don't. Don't get started. Oh, these are beautiful. Look at that hummingbird. That's gorgeous.
- [03:35]
Nicholas De Leon
Yeah, so I'm just messing around, you know, I'm not trying to do anything.
- [03:38]
Leo Laporte
With it, but that's the best way.
- [03:40]
Nicholas De Leon
Yeah.
- [03:41]
Leo Laporte
I've spent thousands on cameras, and I'm just messing around.
- [03:45]
Nicholas De Leon
Well, it's like, I only have expensive, hot PC gaming cameras, you know, next will be cars. I'm sure. It's like. Yeah. Don't I have, like, a more economical. No, I don't.
- [03:56]
Leo Laporte
I wish I were into, like, salt. Different kinds of salt.
- [03:59]
Nicholas De Leon
Yes. Anything literally stamps.
- [04:01]
Leo Laporte
Like this. Bottle caps. Yes.
- [04:05]
Nicholas De Leon
Anything else?
- [04:06]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah. I am deferring right now because I know one of the things people hate when we talk about politics on this show, and I. I understand that. I mean, we would love to be a politics free zone. Back in the day when you did a tech show, you could just talk about cameras and phones, gizmos and gadgets. In hindsight, that might be. Maybe was a little trivial, but there is a lot going on in the world of politics and particularly in the Supreme Court. That's when we have Kathy on. Kathy volunteered. You raised your hand.
- [04:40]
Kathy Gellis
Now I raised my hand.
- [04:41]
Leo Laporte
I have something to say.
- [04:43]
Kathy Gellis
Stuff happened. Would you like me to tell you what happened?
- [04:46]
Leo Laporte
Yes.
- [04:47]
Kathy Gellis
Okay.
- [04:47]
Leo Laporte
So Kathy is an attorney. She practices law, but she specializes in a certain kind of. Kind of IP and technical law and is admitted before the United States Supreme Court, which is a very rarefied stratum. You've written many. I know. Amicus briefs and maybe even in some of these cases. Let's Start with Paxton versus Free Speech Coalition. This is. Mike Masdick wrote about this. This is the.
- [05:18]
Kathy Gellis
Not good.
- [05:20]
Leo Laporte
This is the Supreme. Mike wrote in his lead. The Supreme Court this morning took a chainsaw to the First Amendment on the Internet. So Ken Paxton, the attorney general of the great state of Texas, well, they. What was he trying to do? They passed a law, right?
- [05:40]
Kathy Gellis
They're trying to age gate the Internet, because if you can age gate the Internet, age gating is one way to censor the Internet. And they wanted to do that.
- [05:51]
Leo Laporte
So he. The state had passed. The state legislature had passed a age verification law for social media.
- [05:57]
Kathy Gellis
There's a number of laws that they've got out and some other ones are still being challenged, but this one in particular landed pretty squarely on certain sites that are particularly adult in their content.
- [06:12]
Leo Laporte
And so this lawsuit was against that law from the Free Speech Coalition. Who, who is the Free Speech Coalition? Is that an industry organization?
- [06:21]
Kathy Gellis
I believe it's an industry organization. Without Googling it, I believe it's an industry organization that is more for adult content as opposed to wider, broader content. You didn't necessarily. The general trade organizations do this.
- [06:40]
Leo Laporte
Instead of naming themselves, you know, like the porn purveyors of America, they decided to go for Free Speech Coalition.
- [06:49]
Kathy Gellis
Well, I think they've been around for a while as, as, as an entity and as a trade group for.
- [06:54]
Leo Laporte
They're against obscenity laws, censorship laws, that kind of thing. Adult film producers, adult. The Adult Film association of America kind of spawned this group. And of course, there's been a battle as long as I've been alive against pornography, but in the last 20 years, it's become not only more ubiquitous, but as far as I concern, completely legal, right?
- [07:25]
Kathy Gellis
Yes.
- [07:26]
Leo Laporte
I mean, no state bans pornography. Right. Is that because of the original Supreme Court decision that I don't know what pornography is, but I know I want to see it?
- [07:34]
Kathy Gellis
Oh, I, I'm not a. There's a lot of cases that have held that speech is very protectable. And there are some cases, like there's a case called Miller that sort of talked about when obscenity could be regulated. But the idea. And over time, the court took the stance that, you know, expression, even adult expression, even potentially prurient expression, is still protected expression.
- [08:02]
Leo Laporte
That's kind of interesting because for a long time it was like, well, if it's artistic merit, if there's some, you know, value outside of prurience, the, the desire to stimulate, then it's okay. But you're saying even now it's accepted. Even if it's really just to turn people on, it's okay.
- [08:18]
Kathy Gellis
Well, it's protected. Let me not accidentally use the wrong words for it, because there sort of was a line. But the line, as you pointed out, was not a particularly clear line, but a lot of adult content was fully protected. And that basically meant that if you had a law that interfered with speaking along these lines or reading communications along these lines, that law would have to pass strict scrutiny because it's First Amendment protected and people have the right to access it. You're right about where we've been with this case and this decision. We are not there anymore. Even though Justice Thomas in writing his decision was not particularly honest with himself or the readers of his decision that things have necessarily changed because now there is sort of this occasionally protected, somewhat protected type of speech, which is legal for adults but obscene for children. And this is not a type of speech that has ever been recognized under First Amendment law at all. And the problem is it means that.
- [09:25]
Leo Laporte
There was never an age test in free speech.
- [09:28]
Kathy Gellis
There was never an age, not in those terms. There were some cases that did sort of impinge on young people's ability to speak freely, like particularly speech in schools. But even so, there was still a recognized that young people have First Amendment rights as well.
- [09:47]
Leo Laporte
I think it's also recognized. And by the way, Nicholas, you can jump in with your opinion. You don't have to be. We will just, you will just add Ianal to everything you say and everything I say. We are not lawyers. Kathy is. But it has been, I think, pretty widely recognized that adult content is not suitable for children.
- [10:12]
Kathy Gellis
I don't think there that may not. Well, that's a normative question that adult content is not suitable for children.
- [10:19]
Leo Laporte
So that's the thing. That's what what is kind of generally accepted norm like, yeah, this is bad for kids, you know, to see all this content. And so there's a desire, I don't think unreasonable to say, well, how can we age gate it so that adults can still see it, but kids can't. That doesn't seem to be a bad thing.
- [10:43]
Kathy Gellis
Well, so let me bring back to something technical in this decision because this technical distinction is actually really important. So the issue is not, well, can we keep kids from accessing certain types of information? The issue is if we're going to try, how do we judge whether this effort is constitutional or not? Because you could basically say, for instance, just to go absurdium is okay, well, to keep kids safe from bad content on the Internet Kids can't use the Internet at all. Well, that seems like that's a little over broad. That's going too far. But you need to have some basis to test for. When does your law go too far and if it goes too far, where it's impinging on First Amendment protected rights. Now sometimes you can overcome that with strict scrutiny. That is it narrowly tailored. I'm blanking on the. There's a full language from it. Narrow means narrower. Narrow tailored.
- [11:44]
Leo Laporte
So we've talked about this before. Forgive me for interrupting you so much, but I'm trying to help everybody who's not been listening to every conversation we've had with you over the years. So we've talked about this before. The idea of there is a test called strict scrutiny, which in some cases, if you use strict scrutiny, you're very narrowly defining it. It's okay to constrain the First Amendment.
- [12:12]
Kathy Gellis
Yeah. I don't know if I would sum it up that. But it tends to bless the law because the law is doing as long as you're doing it. Straight scrutiny. Yeah, yeah. If it can overcome. Essentially the outcome is that it pokes a very small hole in First Amendment protection. And the reason we use strict scrutiny is because we want to make sure that that hole that it's poking is as narrow as possible, teeny tiny. That we had such a compelling reason and we've done the narrowest tailored thing in law so that we're not upending and stepping on people's constitutional rights, no matter how well intentioned we want to be. So one of the issues is when this law got enjoined, District court said strict scrutiny applies. When the law got appealed to the 5th Circuit, the 5th Circuit said rational basis, which is the lowest standard.
- [13:03]
Leo Laporte
That basically it's the opposite of strict scrutiny.
- [13:06]
Kathy Gellis
A very opposite. It's basically did the government have any sort of rational basis to do what it did? Okay, fine. It's good. No more questions asked. That's not the right standard either. So the one bit of good news that comes out of this decision is that even Justice Thomas said, no, it's not rational. Rational basis. There's this.
- [13:26]
Leo Laporte
So again, to get people a little grounding, if you had a scale between very narrow strict scrutiny, the complete opposite end of the scale, you'd have intermediate security. But the complete opposite would be rational basis. It's the least restrictive right.
- [13:42]
Kathy Gellis
And then you have an intermediate setting called intermediate scrutiny, which is also right in the middle. Right in the middle. And so this is.
- [13:50]
Leo Laporte
But the fifth Circuit decided not to Use that. But in fact to say no, no, we want the most liberal interpretation. The reason this is important to tech is because not so much to protect porn. I don't think that's our job. But the only way you can make this law work is by universal age verification online.
- [14:12]
Kathy Gellis
Yeah, that was one of the upshots, or at least for this type of material. What the court then ended up doing is saying no, the correct standard. He decided that this was content neutral law, which I think is a highly dubious proposition. And then because it was content neutral, we only need to use intermediate scrutiny. And that standard is much, much less. And if we call our minds back, we've talked about this before because they used intermediate scrutiny for TikTok for the TikTok ban, where they looked past how it was stamping on protected First Amendment right issues saying it's content neutral for the national security. Really have to look at how carefully tailored the means are that the law is using to fulfill its goal. Same problem with why that Was bad in TikTok is also why it's bad here because it's going to make a mess of protected speech and people's ability to speak and read and interact with protected speech and their other First Amendment rights, including the ability to read and write on the Internet anonymously.
- [15:23]
Leo Laporte
So Mike Masnik, whose headline says the conservatives on the Supreme Court are so scared of nudity they'll throw out the First Amendment, which is maybe a little strong. But he does explain here that he says the real danger isn't just Texas's age verification law. It's that with this majority decision, it was a 6, 3 decision in favor of Ken Paxton, is that Thomas has handed every state legislature a roadmap for circumventing the First Amendment online. His reasoning that the real that the Internet has changed and that intermediate scrutiny suffices for content based restrictions. And Mike fears that that decision will be cited in countless future cases targeting not just pornography. And this is why it's really important. But online speech. Expect age verification, he writes, to be attempted for social media platforms, for news sites, and for any online speech that makes moral authorities uncomfortable. News sites to protect minors from disturbing imagery, for instance.
- [16:26]
Kathy Gellis
Well, one of the things that's a bit that's a big problem with this is this idea that there is something that can be this whole category of speech, something that is obscene for children but not unlawful for adults. We've never had that category of speech. And it's also creating this idea that there's speech that is sort of partially Protected where it's usually it's an either or situation. Either the speech is not protected, which only covers a very small amount of speech, or it's protected, and end of story, it's protected. And you don't get to mess with protected speech unless you can overcome strict scrutiny. And here he's like, now there's this other thing. It's kind of okay, kind of. When we see it. At the same time, he's also sort of saying, no, we didn't really change any of the precedent that we already had. Okay, As a litigator, all the litigators are going to be ramming that, you know, down the Supreme Court's throats and all the other court's throats to say that all the other precedent that didn't do things this way is still operative and in effect, and we're going to kind of ignore this and try to isolate it, and maybe this case can be isolated on the facts in terms of the specific language of this law and how it applied to something which was presumably not going to reach more general types of speech.
- [17:46]
Leo Laporte
There will be states as a result of this that will, for instance. In fact, there are already states trying to do this, pass age verification for social networks, and Texas has some more.
- [17:57]
Kathy Gellis
And most of them have. They've been challenged, have actually been enjoined, both by district courts and also the appeals court, unless you happen to be in the fifth Circuit.
- [18:07]
Leo Laporte
Now there's a Supreme Court decision that says, basically it's okay, well, the litigators.
- [18:13]
Kathy Gellis
Are going to try to narrow this.
- [18:14]
Leo Laporte
Here one is age verification itself. It doesn't really. It violates privacy because it's not just kids that have to verify their ages. It's everybody. Which means you and I to now I guess you could say, well, big deal, Pornhub. Okay, I won't go see Pornhub. But if you wanted to use X.com or Blue sky or Facebook and you had to give them government ID to prove that you're over 16, you might say, gosh, should those companies have that information about me? And the Supreme Court's basically giving them the ability to do that. Right. A state to pass a law like.
- [18:53]
Kathy Gellis
That, Mike, is, I think, right in that this is a roadmap for how other states are going to do it, but it isn't necessarily how other states have done it. So the laws that have been on the books are still potentially challengeable. And one of the other things about these other laws is they. This one was targeting certain types of speech a little More directly, it was more adult. And I think, I don't know if this law necessarily would scale automatically to something like social media where there's all sorts of speech, including stuff that is clearly not obscene. But I think the bigger danger here is states and localities tend to decide what's obscene or not. And we know that some states like to call LBGT type information, including for kids, and they'll call it obscene.
- [19:41]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [19:41]
Kathy Gellis
So I, yeah, this isn't, this isn't good. I don't want to excuse it as being good. I want to headline it as being bad, thinking of it as a litigator. I'm going to think of ways that, you know, we can minimize the damage and keep going and keep having good precedent that we can still waive. But it was a bad decision. The dissent from Justice Kagan is very apt. She calls it that there's a decision that's at war with itself because he keeps trying to say, I'm doing this, but I'm not really doing this. So then what's left? It's not good and it shows. I mean, I remember from oral argument the justices were like, maybe it's time to revisit, you know, how we protect First Amendment for children online. That they wanted to revisit its former precedent because everyone's using it now. And somehow because everyone's using technology now, now the Constitution needs to give way. I mean, it's really sort of a frightening attitude. Even if this decision might be something that we can kind of isolate out and not be too effective affected by, but we also may be very affected by it. So stay tuned.
- [20:43]
Leo Laporte
Psych. So many things happening these days. The, the long term impact is unknown.
- [20:49]
Nicholas De Leon
But can I ask a dumb question?
- [20:51]
Leo Laporte
Yes.
- [20:53]
Nicholas De Leon
I am not a lawyer. I am definitely not a lawyer, but something Kathy, you said earlier where, you know, the idea that creating laws for people under a certain age is. We've never done that before. Speech laws. That's. Why is that, why is that so controversial? Like, I don't, I guess I don't understand. Like, if I'm a parent, I don't necessarily want my kid consuming certain content. Why, like, why is that so bad? I guess is my question.
- [21:17]
Kathy Gellis
Oh, you can decide, you know, as the parent, you have the ability and you know, section 230 talks about developing tools that.
- [21:26]
Leo Laporte
And even schools can decide, right? Schools can make, ban certain T shirts.
- [21:32]
Kathy Gellis
That's bringing in some different First Amendment law with respect to kids.
- [21:36]
Leo Laporte
But kids don't have blanket First Amendment rights, though.
- [21:41]
Kathy Gellis
I mean, I think they Start out with blanket First Amendment rights. The issue is that it can be overcome with strict scrutiny in a number of situations. Although I would look at some of the, like the Hazelwood decision and the Bong hits for Jesus decision as being aberrant and really harmful to, to kids.
- [21:59]
Leo Laporte
First Amendment rights decision called Bong hits for Jesus has got to be aberrant.
- [22:03]
Kathy Gellis
But, But Tinker, Tinker vs. Des Moines was a very pro. You know, kids have First Amendment rights and need to have First Amendment rights and they still exist. So that is basically the starting point. So in terms of Daniel of Nicholas's question, the issue is a denormative one of should we say that kids should be able to see absolutely everything? But there is a huge problem in terms of, well, who gets to decide what they get to see? Because we were talking about how certain states are going to decide certain things that, you know, you may want your kids, we may agree that kids should be able to see. And also in terms of this particular law, even if we say fine, kids can't see anything, we totally have to protect them. Imposing this type of law where everybody needs to essentially identify themselves has a huge impact on all the grownups using the Internet as well. And grownups have an affirmative First Amendment right to speak anonymously, including speaking anonymously online. That goes out the window.
- [23:06]
Leo Laporte
If you have no identifying, there's no anonymous speech. Right.
- [23:09]
Kathy Gellis
And then the privacy.
- [23:10]
Leo Laporte
Can we come up with a third party escrow system that might work so that you don't have to give your information to the social network, but some third party and they verify and vouch.
- [23:20]
Kathy Gellis
The third parties keep trying to promote them and postulate them. And I know that you've had like Shoshana Weinstein on your. Weisman on your show. Let her tell you why all of that is garbage.
- [23:34]
Leo Laporte
She's written an excellent piece@rstreet.org a couple of years ago, but it stands today about why. Age verification.
- [23:40]
Kathy Gellis
Yeah.
- [23:41]
Leo Laporte
And that is by the way, a conservative think tank. So, you know, I mean, we're already over time on this one story. We have many. But I guess the best we can do at this point is watch and wait and see what states do and see what social networks do. Would you be against the idea, which I have floated and others have, that maybe the best way to handle this is for companies like Google and Apple to allow parents to set a age on the phone of their children and let that be the gate to which social media has to pass through. In other words, yeah, my kid. And by the way you can say my kid is adult enough, I'm gonna say my kid's 18. Even if they're 12 or my 18 year old really doesn't have the mental capacity to deal with pornography. So I'm gonna say he's 12. Shouldn't parents, in other words, be the ones to decide this? And couldn't Apple in a privacy forward way support this kind of thing with an API that then Blue sky would say, oh, the parents say this is inappropriate so we're not gonna let them install it?
- [24:54]
Kathy Gellis
I mean, let me break this down what your question is, because I don't know which question you're asking. Is there in a world where everybody is free under the First Amendment to innovate freely and make whatever editorial decisions they want for their kids and for themselves and this and the other thing, is there something where the gang could get together, we put bright minds to, you know, to the task and figure out if there's something that could be done? I don't know. I'm dubious, but I don't know. Maybe we could. Where basically as long as it's voluntary, where Apple offers, we're going to have this toggle and you can press this toggle, you can set the toggle and companies are voluntarily going to decide how they want to respond to that toggle. Maybe we could live in that world. I think there will be consequences, but maybe they'd even themselves out. But do we do that under the force of law? Because we have to. And that is an absolute nonstarter because let's say the toggle is 18 and the kid is 12. Who's going to decide what is appropriate to come down the pipe if the person is 18, even if they're really 18. And who's to say what's not appropriate if they're 17? Is that really such a different universe of material? You know, people who are one year off of being able to register to vote now all of a sudden can't see things. And then the other part of it.
- [26:09]
Leo Laporte
Nobody doubts the parents right to do that though, right? I mean that's the parents right and it's not. And by the way, that's not protected by the first Amendment because the parent is not government. So if we give a mechanism for parents to make that decision, I mean, of course kids can, of course there's lots of loopholes. Kids can always, you know, get their own phone. But, but that seems to be to cover a lot of situations without in any way putting the first amendment into it.
- [26:33]
Kathy Gellis
Well, none of this is content neutral, which again was really key to this decision. When things are not content neutral, strict scrutiny applies because that is really affecting the free speech rights to speak and read and things like that. The question is if you want to kind of, and I think you're approaching this as an innovation and like here's a technical problem, here's a social problem, is there a technical solution for it? I'm still dubious of whether that could actually, actually produce something effective. But fine, go ahead and try.
- [27:02]
Leo Laporte
Well, it's better than making a law.
- [27:05]
Kathy Gellis
Well, better, absolutely better than the law. But the other thing I want to kind of highlight is, you know, you said it's sort of the hypothetical with social media. Social media is an entire universe of, of, you know, incredible breadth of information and communication that's passing through it. How are those content based decisions about what is appropriate to Go for the 18 toggle, the 17 toggle, the 16 toggle?
- [27:27]
Leo Laporte
Because it's apparent Kathy. And the parent gets to decide, period. Anyway. And the point is, look, this is far superior to what's going to happen, which is that laws will be made. And it's not hypothetical because both Apple and Google have both implemented similar systems and are considering exactly what I just described. And they have in a way to enforce it because of course they have closed app stores at least, least in the US So that they could say you can't be in the app store unless you adhere to our API and block kids of a, you know, block this people, kids whose parents say they don't want them to see it. I think that's completely reasonable.
- [28:11]
Kathy Gellis
But still what is getting blocked?
- [28:12]
Leo Laporte
So you know, the parent decides what's getting blocked.
- [28:15]
Kathy Gellis
No, they can't. They can only send the toggle. The toggle says, okay, the kid needs to be considered 17. So then the software recognizes that the, the user is 17. But how does Facebook know which Facebook posts are okay for the 17 year old and not for this 16 year old? And you know, the Facebook is still going to be making decisions and maybe that now means no cat pictures for the 17 year olds because they just can't tell. Somebody is still being forced to make content decisions and it's not the parent at that point it's now going to be self censorship as. But which I think is not.
- [28:50]
Leo Laporte
It's not the perfect solution. I think it's better than the current situation.
- [28:54]
Kathy Gellis
Well, certainly better than law. I mean I wouldn't mind.
- [28:57]
Leo Laporte
So would you advocate there should be no parental controls at all?
- [29:03]
Kathy Gellis
Not the way they're being conceptualized I think it's too problematic. And I really do stand affirmatively for the First Amendment rights of particularly teenagers. I think they're young minds, they're sophisticated. They need access to information and they're capable of actually interfacing with information. They need to be able to understand the world around them if we're going to raise them to be, you know, civically engaged, competent people. So I would say, oh, go ahead.
- [29:29]
Nicholas De Leon
That's. I was just jumping and say that sounds like the exact opposite of the way that I was raised. My mother was basically to the right of Stalin.
- [29:37]
Leo Laporte
She.
- [29:38]
Nicholas De Leon
What she's. And I respect now as an adult, I respect it immensely. She did not play games. She did not think that I had the right to understand the world. No, no. What she said was the law, and I didn't. I never flattered it. So it's like I, I. There's different parenting styles and I get it. But just speaking me personally, I was raised in extra. It wasn't even necessarily religious. It wasn't religious. It was just like her way of the highway is the best way to describe it.
- [30:05]
Leo Laporte
And I think that's her right.
- [30:07]
Nicholas De Leon
It was her right.
- [30:07]
Leo Laporte
That's her right.
- [30:08]
Nicholas De Leon
That's. Yeah.
- [30:09]
Leo Laporte
That's what a parent. That's, yeah. Called parenting. And I think that far better for a parent to do that than the state. I understand what you're saying, Kathy, is that in this case, you know, you'd have a switch, that it would ultimately be the decision of the social network as opposed to the parent.
- [30:26]
Kathy Gellis
Well, I also worry about it.
- [30:27]
Leo Laporte
It's not a perfect solution. I think it's a better. And I think the other option for your mom, Nicholas, would be to say no phone at all for you. Right.
- [30:35]
Nicholas De Leon
That's basically. We, we did not. We were not allowed to play video games during the week. The computer was in the family room. There were rules that were very hard and, you know, they were codified. You knew what the rules were. I thought, I never. And I never thought it was a big deal as a kid. You know, I wasn't.
- [30:52]
Leo Laporte
My parents said, you can only watch half an hour of TV a night. And it pissed the hell out of me.
- [30:57]
Kathy Gellis
My parents didn't allow a whole lot of tv. But on the other hand. And let me jump right. My parents didn't object to. Well, we didn't really have the Internet when I was in high school, but they didn't object to me having First Amendment rights. And in fact, they supported me when I was the editor in chief of the High school paper promised down an anonymity to a letter writer, had the school hand my name to the police because they wanted to investigate the have me turn it over. And my parents supported me when we went and got an ACLU cooperating attorney to defend my First Amendment rights as a student, my 17 year old student journalist, because that's a reason why First Amendment rights need to apply to kids. Because we're busy doing journalism and doing valuable things in terms of contributing to discourse. So I agree against like anything that would prevent any of that.
- [31:54]
Leo Laporte
By the way, the Bong Hits for Jesus Banner was hanging for a while at the Newseum in, in Washington D.C. but the museum closed a couple of years ago. So I don't know where the Bong Hits for Jesus Banner has ended up, but that kid got kicked out of school for doing it. Even though he didn't do it in school, he did it on a public street. Supreme Court said, nope, school can do it because it's promoting illegal drug use. We're gonna take a break. We'll come back in just a little bit. I'm glad that the, I'm glad your parents defended you. Did you, Were you able to keep that letter writer's identity a secret?
- [32:27]
Kathy Gellis
Yes, but we didn't end up getting to publish the letter. But ACLU cooperating attorney to the rescue.
- [32:33]
Leo Laporte
Nice. Is that why you became an attorney?
- [32:36]
Kathy Gellis
No, I've been cooking this way for my entire. Well, not because of that, but I picked that fight because this is what I believed and I've just grown into exactly the same person that I always was.
- [32:46]
Leo Laporte
Your parents raised you well.
- [32:48]
Kathy Gellis
Well, thank you.
- [32:48]
Leo Laporte
And you know what, Nicholas? You turned out okay too. Do you play video games during the week though?
- [32:55]
Nicholas De Leon
I, I, I will say it took me a very long time to do that actually. Like, I felt guilty as an adult.
- [33:02]
Leo Laporte
I still feel guilty playing old and.
- [33:04]
Nicholas De Leon
Tired and like, yeah, I don't even have the energy anymore. But for it took a while for me to be like, there's no one to tell me I can't.
- [33:11]
Leo Laporte
So yeah, your mom's head voices is still in your head, right?
- [33:14]
Nicholas De Leon
Oh, she definitely is.
- [33:15]
Leo Laporte
She definitely go outside.
- [33:18]
Kathy Gellis
My dad brought a pet computer home when I was in kindergarten. He brought an Atari 800 home when I was in first grade. He taught me how to play the video games. Although then I think there were some.
- [33:28]
Leo Laporte
Rules about it, but nice I, I, everybody last week on the show said, oh, you got to play this new game, Expedition 33. So against my better. Have you played it?
- [33:40]
Nicholas De Leon
I have Not. It's on my wish list.
- [33:41]
Leo Laporte
It's an rpg. It's a turn based rpg, but it's French, so it's very arty and the music's beautiful in French. And you know, it's an interesting. It's interesting. I played it a couple of hours because it's on game pass so I didn't have to buy it and I died. And that's it, the game's over. I said, what? I can't go back to my lab? No, game over. I said, that's it. No more video games. I'm not going to waste my time playing video games. I'm going to learn the piano instead. Something useful. So, Nicholas, whatever, do whatever you want.
- [34:18]
Kathy Gellis
I played video games and had piano lessons. You can multitask as a child.
- [34:23]
Leo Laporte
I know, but I figure every hour I spend learning how to manipulate this controller could be an hour I spend learning how to play.
- [34:30]
Kathy Gellis
Yeah, there's other things you can do with your dexterity other than just blow something away.
- [34:34]
D
This bonito, that's a hand. Eye coordination you're getting though, playing video games.
- [34:38]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Well, I'm also getting at playing the piano.
- [34:41]
D
Different, but yeah.
- [34:42]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [34:42]
D
And just one note if you want.
- [34:44]
Leo Laporte
To get away at the end of the video game. What have I gained? I've solved Expedition 33. At the end of the 5 or 60 hours of playing the piano, I can actually play the entertainer.
- [34:55]
Kathy Gellis
And what about for children where they're going to be taught to play the piano via in an Internet based game?
- [35:00]
Leo Laporte
Oh, interesting. In fact, there are quite a few. There's some very good Internet based games, piano tools that I've used myself. Yeah, they don't age gate those.
- [35:08]
D
If you want to not feel guilty about playing video games during the week or whatever. It's like you get, you get a job in the video game industry and it all feels justified.
- [35:17]
Leo Laporte
What are you gonna do, make a living playing video games, Nicholas?
- [35:21]
Nicholas De Leon
Well, not anymore. They lay people off every 10 minutes.
- [35:23]
D
Yes, this is true.
- [35:24]
Leo Laporte
This is true.
- [35:25]
Kathy Gellis
Yeah, the parents were right. The parents were right.
- [35:27]
Leo Laporte
All right. You're watching this week in tech with firebrand Kathy Gellis. Ever since high school, she's been a firebrand contributor at Tech Dir. Of course, Nicholas De Leon, who is now senior electronics reporter at Consumer Reports. That's very nice. And newly engaged. Congratulations. Can I say that on the show or should I edit that?
- [35:47]
Nicholas De Leon
Sure. That's play. That's, that's let's live there. That's fine.
- [35:51]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Your fiance and my wife have a back channel they're besties.
- [35:56]
D
Yeah, they have a secret.
- [35:58]
Leo Laporte
Slack. So cute. And so Lisa said okay, you, you don't know this but ask Nicholas how it's going.
- [36:07]
Nicholas De Leon
Lisa was one of the first people she told, if I'm not mistaken.
- [36:10]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, she sent a picture of a rock and looks a nice looking rock. Good job. Well done, Nicholas. She is a catch. We'll be back with more in just a bit. You're watching this week in tech. Our show today brought to you by StoryBlock. Now if you have ever worked at a publication or in a marketing firm anywhere with a website, you know the pain of legacy content management systems. There are some amazingly bad enterprise CMSs out there. You know they, they offer or promise anyway enterprise grade features, but what do you get? You get a slow clunky system that needs dev support for even the smallest update. And if you're trying to move fast, that's a nightmare. Well, let me tell you about StoryBlock because StoryBlock changes all that. Unlike monolithic CMS's. StoryBlock this is, I don't, I know about this and it's really cool. I don't know if it's immediately clear why this is a benefit. It's, it's a headless. It's headless. Okay, so it's a backend. It's API driven back end, completely decoupling that back end from your front end, whatever you want. That means your devs can build in any framework they want, React Astro Vue making API calls to the backend. And StoryBlock comes with this beautiful intuitive visual editor which marketers and creatives can use to create and update content and get it just the way they want without filing dev tickets. Oh, and storyblocks scales, you know, it's a robust backend whether you're a freelancer, a part of a global enterprise. Storyblocks global CDN AWS data centers in the us, Europe and Asia is built for performance at scale. It is enterprise ready. StoryBlock offers role based access control, enterprise SLAs, of course, top tier security. It's all the things Fortune 500's demand. One global e commerce giant switched to StoryBlock and cut content update cycles from weeks to hours. Nowadays you gotta move fast. Another major brand empowered marketing to launch campaigns independently, freeing up the devs for bigger projects. StoryBlock has an API first approach, right? That robust backend so your content loads faster anywhere in the world. It means better ux, higher engagement, improved SEO and that real time visual editor marketers see exactly what their content will look like before publishing no more endless back and forth over minor tweaks. And devs get fewer interruptions, marketers get more autonomy. It's a win all round. Oh, and if you're an agency, you'll love this. Storyblock offers multi client workspaces, flexible permissions, seamless collaboration tools so you can manage multiple projects without disrupting development workflows. So whether you're a startup, an enterprise or an agency juggling multiple clients, StoryBlock gives you the power and flexibility you need. Try it today at storyblock.com and use code TWIT25. Twittlisteners will get 20% off for three months on growth and growth plus plans. That's storyblock.com twittv-25 and the code TWIT25 for 20% off the first three months on growth and growth plus Plans. S t o r y dash b l o k dot com twitt tv dash 25 and the code is TWIT25. Storyblock, I think you'll like it. And we thank him so much for supporting our show. Oh gosh. There was a lot going on with the Supreme Court. That's because they were closing their session. Right. This was last Friday was their last day.
- [40:00]
Kathy Gellis
They heard that in January. And I was really worried when other cases that were heard after it were getting decided and this one was just hanging back and hanging back and hanging back. And I find it last minute. Yeah. And I find it both disturbing in terms of the judgment, but also that it didn't remand back to the 5th Circuit to say now that we've told you what standard to use, go apply it. It also presumed to apply the standard to the law. And I don't know where we stand right now except the whole thing was. And joined. So I, I don't know this. It's not good. It was.
- [40:37]
Leo Laporte
It's up in the air.
- [40:39]
Kathy Gellis
Let's talk about the air.
- [40:41]
Leo Laporte
Let's talk about dmca because that was also a decision. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Just to put this in perspective, this story from Tech Meme. I'm sorry, the New York times this week YouTube pirates are cashing in on Hollywood summer blockbusters. You would think YouTube we get taken down or we get strikes or we get pinged every time I play it. A trailer for a movie coming up. But apparently it's no big deal to get lots of full length copyrighted current movies up on YouTube. Hundreds, let's see, hundreds of films are at YouTube's request. Analytics which did this study provided 200 videos for YouTube review, most of them full length films, probably pirated. The founder of Athletics who did this study says he observed 9,000 examples of possible copyright violations, including full length movies in theatrical release, TV shows like the Family Guy Live, NCAA college football games. The videos had more than 250 million views. So. So all I bring this up to show that enforcement is very haphazard in this stuff. YouTube has content ID, which is supposed to work. It does work in our case, way too well. It's created a huge chilling effect. We're doing a news show and I can't play clips and show stuff or play even sounds that some copyright holder has, even if it's in the coverage of the story, which, which is clearly protected by fair use, but without getting immediately dinged. And of course I can't afford to defend it. I don't. Can't. Our stuff is like fish wrap. It doesn't survive the day. So taking a week to get it justified and back up is not worth it. So we just don't do it. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has granted cert to a related story. This. I love this. This. You've used this phrase before on the show. Jawboning here is from R Street. Oh, you're writing for R Street now?
- [43:01]
Kathy Gellis
Well, I did that last year. I'm not sure we ever talked about it on the show, but this was a big white paper that I wrote basically arguing that the Digital Millennium Copyright act, at least section 512 as we know and quote, unquote, love it, has a jawboning problem. That it basically is jawboning.
- [43:18]
Leo Laporte
What is jawboning?
- [43:20]
Kathy Gellis
Jawboning is essentially where the government can't directly cause speech to be deterred because that would be a First Amendment violation. It instead leans on a third party and says if you know what's good for you, you'll get rid of that. And it's this idea that it can kind of like wash away the first amendment violation.
- [43:44]
Leo Laporte
So you don't even go to court, you just, just threaten.
- [43:47]
Kathy Gellis
Right. And so the whole point of the, of the DMCA is to keep people out of court.
- [43:52]
Leo Laporte
It's a little bit weird how it works, right? Because content ID has stopped us completely.
- [44:00]
Kathy Gellis
Well, so I think in terms of the techmeme article, just looking over it, one of the things is Google's running a whole lot of automatic systems to try to detect things. And it looks like the people who want to upload are finding ways to fool the automatic systems, whereas it's capable of finding your snipp but it's less capable of finding these.
- [44:20]
Leo Laporte
It's always the case with piracy that dedicated pirates will always get around any for enforcement. Meanwhile honest citizens who are not attempting to end around the enforcement get get scooped up.
- [44:34]
Kathy Gellis
Right, the notice and takedown regime. So the paper that I linked to and the papers from so conveniently November of last year, so so many people paid attention to that in November of last year. But basically it's arguing that notice and takedown and basically any of these laws where we're causing any law where the government wants to affect what speech can exist online by creating liability for the intermediary has a jawboning problem where it's.
- [45:06]
Leo Laporte
So what did this granting cert do? What is the case?
- [45:10]
Kathy Gellis
So the case is Cox versus Sony. I think it's Cox Communication versus Sony Entertainment, whatever they are. And this case has been going on for years and years and years, or at least actually this one too. But it also comes out of that other case, BMG versus Cox. So Cox in this case is a full service ISP that is providing broadband access to users and they received a whole bunch of takedown notices and there's issues of did they take, did they dis. There's a thing under the DMCA that if you're going to be eligible for the safe harbor, you have to disable repeat infringers. And what Sony is alleging is that they didn't take down the repeat infringers and this ended up leading to an enormous liability decision against them. But this case has evolved a little bit like that. And this is sort of the last gasp of the case where it's really looking in terms of how secondary liability under copyright was decided to find Cox Communications liable at all. Because what happened is when they lost their DMCA protection, now they're sitting there as just full defendants to a copyright infringement.
- [46:27]
Leo Laporte
So as an isp, they are now liable for what their customers are doing.
- [46:32]
Kathy Gellis
This was what they were secondarily liable.
- [46:34]
Leo Laporte
Back in the day. We talked about this last week. We had a great interview with Stephen Witt, who wrote a book called How Music Got Free, talking about this kind of misguided attempt to go after housewives and moms who were file sharing, suing their customers, basically music industry, which it backfired on them terribly.
- [46:59]
Kathy Gellis
It did. And then this case also points out. So in this case, the termination provision of the DMCA isn't really on the table, but as a litigator, I'm thinking it's going to be on the table because it hasn't really been fully tested because a lot of what the DMCA was kind of conceiving is like, okay, somebody's posting on YouTube too many pirated videos and so kick them off of that platform. They don't get to avail themselves of that platform anymore because they keep pirating stuff.
- [47:25]
Leo Laporte
So just as an example, I'm. Now, I'm not going to play it because I don't want to get taken down, but I think you can show the index page of this. Black Sabbath yesterday made their final performance in England. There is already a video up of this final performance, I'm sure. Complete violation of copyright. 264,000 views in seven hours. And this isn't the only one. There are many. There's, of course, a lot of interest among Black Sabbath fans. It's their last performance. They say.
- [48:01]
Kathy Gellis
Well, so the copies.
- [48:03]
Leo Laporte
This is not. This is not sanctioned by the music industry or by the band. And YouTube doesn't apparently take it down. I guess maybe it's live. No, there's an idea. Doesn't work.
- [48:13]
D
There's actually a way to do this. What you have to do is you have to slightly modify the video. Like, you have to zoom in.
- [48:18]
Leo Laporte
Why didn't you tell us this? We could have been running.
- [48:21]
D
Because it's still sketchy.
- [48:23]
Kathy Gellis
I mean, it's an arms race and, you know, you'll. I mean, the pirates will zig and the. And YouTube will zag and. But that wasn't my point.
- [48:31]
Leo Laporte
Concert was pay per view only, so it is definitely a copyright.
- [48:36]
D
So a common, common strategy is just to flip the video so it becomes a mirror. So now content ID doesn't see it properly.
- [48:41]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that's backwards.
- [48:44]
Nicholas De Leon
I've seen. I've seen the video flip. I've also seen someone take like a movie and put it, like on a tv. So you're watching, like a TV watching the movie.
- [48:55]
Leo Laporte
For a long time, we thought if we didn't run it full screen, yeah, we wouldn't get caught. And then, of course, they updated it and, and then they said, oh, no. And I don't know, we stopped trying to get around it. I just don't play copyrighted material anymore. Even if it is in, you know, in this case, showing this page is coverage of a news story.
- [49:15]
Kathy Gellis
Fair use in some way, in every way.
- [49:18]
Leo Laporte
Hey, let's talk about fair use, because that's also on the docket, actually.
- [49:22]
Kathy Gellis
If I can just add to something, because I didn't mean to go down. YouTube was the one example, but Cox Communications is a Full service isp. So consider what the implications are with, you know, these people were doing file sharing via BitTorrent or they're alleged to have done it. And the idea that Cox had to kick people off their full service ISP so they get no broadband connection, not through Cox. And maybe, as we know, that may have been the only monopoly player in their town. If they're not on Cox, are they on anybody else? What happens if it's a coffee shop that's offering free WI fi to its customers at a customer's file sharing? Now, the irony gets kicked off way.
- [50:00]
Leo Laporte
Back when in these music industry cases, the worst pirates got off because when they realized they were being investigated by the FBI, they took the passwords off their WI Fi routers to give them plausible deniability, saying, well, it may have been us, but anybody could use our Internet. And it worked.
- [50:23]
Kathy Gellis
Well, it's not even just, it's not even a question of plausible deniability. Let's say there's people at the at home have been file sharing, you know.
- [50:31]
Leo Laporte
Every day for weeks, had passwords until they knew they were being investigated and then they took them off.
- [50:37]
Kathy Gellis
But even, even if that were true and they're sitting at home and they're file sharing stuff, the idea that they don't get to use the Internet in this day and age at all, like this is, that is a sanction where the idea that Cox has to keep have to kick people off their broadband connection and we're going to be like, that's a perfectly fine policy thing to have baked into law. Again, if we go back to the speech, the Free Speech Coalition case, one of Thomas's issues is, well, everybody's using the Internet now. Exactly. Everybody's using the Internet now. So let's think about what a huge, enormous penalty it is that people would have to get cut off. And now we're going to hold Cox liable for what their users are doing at all, period. But especially because they didn't kick people off of their possibly only broadband connection to the Internet.
- [51:28]
Leo Laporte
We don't know how this case is going to go. I mean, maybe, maybe the Supreme Court will say, oh, yeah, that's ridiculous.
- [51:34]
Kathy Gellis
I hope so. I mean, I'm not that enthusiastic about this particular court, but I'm certainly going to join the, you know, the people writing amicus briefs to try to like, make that point.
- [51:45]
Leo Laporte
There was a big decision. Well, actually there were two kind of conflicting decisions from the Northern California federal bench about AI and copyrighted works. We'll get to that in Just a little bit. I know there's a lot of questions, court stuff. This will be the last of the bunch. And then we'll have other things to talk about, including Nicholas De Leon's favorite video games to be played on a weekend. Only.
- [52:11]
Nicholas De Leon
A lot of World of Warcraft lately, actually.
- [52:13]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah. Really?
- [52:14]
Nicholas De Leon
Yeah, I got back in about a week ago. I, I been playing this game on and off for 20 years.
- [52:19]
Leo Laporte
Has it changed?
- [52:21]
Nicholas De Leon
It's. It's way different. I mean it's. This could be a whole show. It's. They have multiple different versions that they offer now. So they offer a version that was the way it was back in 2000. 2004, 2005, when I played.
- [52:32]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah.
- [52:33]
Nicholas De Leon
So it's. It's like the closest thing to a time machine that a company has invented.
- [52:37]
Leo Laporte
It's mmr. Mmorpg. Oh, mmorpg, yeah. Massively multiplayer online role playing game. So you're going into this world with other people playing? Yes. Well, tell me about your character. Is it a level you're leveling up?
- [52:53]
Nicholas De Leon
I mean, I, I just, I, I've been messing around with alts. They'll call the like, different character. I'm trying.
- [52:58]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's kind of fun. Sorcerer.
- [53:02]
Nicholas De Leon
A Draenei priest right now, which is kind. In all the years I've played it, I've never really done a priest. I've never, I never got the idea of healing. Now I'm like, ah, let me give that a shot.
- [53:11]
Leo Laporte
It's fun casting spells. I like ranged attacks. I don't like to get in there and Tank. I don't want to. I want to, I want to stand back and throw spells.
- [53:21]
Nicholas De Leon
I started, you know, everyone starts as DPS initially because that's the easiest to understand. And then right then I did Tank.
- [53:27]
Kathy Gellis
Tank.
- [53:27]
Nicholas De Leon
And now I'm messing around with healing, so. But it's like, it's only. I feel like the game is almost only like 40 year olds. I can't imagine like an 18 year old playing World of Warcraft today.
- [53:38]
Leo Laporte
Are you playing the War within or the new one? Or are you.
- [53:41]
Nicholas De Leon
I'm. I'm doing Buzz and playing the War within and then going back and playing the old one as it existed back in the day. It is fun. It's so much harder.
- [53:49]
Leo Laporte
Nostalgia.
- [53:50]
Nicholas De Leon
The original one is so much. There's so less hand holding. Like there's no arrows pointing which direction. It just says in the text. It's like, oh, my friend Steve, the hill, he's west of the lake.
- [54:01]
Leo Laporte
You have to figure out what down the hill is.
- [54:03]
Nicholas De Leon
It is. So. But the. The good part about that, it's just so much more immersive and so much more like. It feels like a real world as opposed to like playing a video game where you just follow the arrow and click the thing. This is more. It's way harder. It's way harder, but it's. It's fun in a different way.
- [54:21]
Leo Laporte
The. A lot of experts in Internet addiction point to World of Warcraft as being this amazingly powerful kind of virtuous circle because you. You change things. You watch how players. You know, what. What. What the drops do, but. And you watch how players respond. And eventually you get really good at addicting people. And there were people back in the day who died. There was a guy, a player in South Korea died because he didn't go to the bathroom for, like, 12 hours.
- [54:51]
Nicholas De Leon
I remember those stories, I mean, unironically, from, like, 2006 until 2210. World of Warcraft is basically the only thing I cared about. Like, without, like, without exaggeration. Four years. Oh, she knows.
- [55:03]
Leo Laporte
Okay. She probably played. I think she.
- [55:06]
Nicholas De Leon
She finds it funny. She's, like, real. She literally. She plays like. She just started playing some, like, farm. Farmville ripoff on her phone.
- [55:13]
D
It's like, oh, my God.
- [55:15]
Nicholas De Leon
Yeah, it's really disgusting, actually.
- [55:20]
Leo Laporte
Introduce. Introduce her at least to a. Do. Do you have a switch?
- [55:26]
Nicholas De Leon
Yeah, we have three switches. We have a switch.
- [55:29]
Leo Laporte
Oh, do they have a switch? Do you have the new switch?
- [55:32]
Nicholas De Leon
No, I tried to buy the switch. I could. I couldn't buy it when it was at launch. So I was like, I'll check back later in the year. We will get it eventually.
- [55:39]
Leo Laporte
But introduce her to Animal Crossing, because if you're going to play a farm game.
- [55:42]
Nicholas De Leon
That's what I said. She's like, no, I like this one. I was like, okay, never mind.
- [55:47]
Leo Laporte
But they've got crops. Okay, okay. That was a little amuse bouche to break up the court case.
- [55:55]
Kathy Gellis
This has been an actual conversation about video games.
- [56:01]
Leo Laporte
We will have more in just a bit with Kathy Gellis, this great attorney at law who is a proud believer in the First Amendment and free speech and an absolutist when it comes to the Constitution of the United States of America. What did you do for the Fourth of July? You. Did you celebrate? Did you set off fireworks in the houseboat?
- [56:20]
Kathy Gellis
Oh, God, don't do that on a wooden marina. That would be a really bad idea. Also in this county is completely illegal. No, we. Some friends and I went down, I might add, yeah, some friends and I went down to watch the town's fireworks, but they were canceled because the barge they were supposed to be launched from was.
- [56:39]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it sank. It wasn't the only Bay Area barge that sank. And then a lot of fireworks displays in our area were canceled because the fireworks factory blew up.
- [56:51]
Kathy Gellis
But, yeah, tragically, I feel like this 4th of July may have been a metaphor in many ways, but I did also feel like we had fireworks and no way to launch them. Other towns had places to launch them, but no fireworks.
- [57:07]
Leo Laporte
Blow up. Blew up.
- [57:09]
Kathy Gellis
This was.
- [57:11]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, this was the barge in Incline Village, Nevada, sank. Cancellation of Lake Tahoe's fourth of July. I don't remember these barges ever collapsing before. This is the first.
- [57:22]
Kathy Gellis
I don't know if Sausalitos sank, but it was, they said, taking on water.
- [57:27]
Leo Laporte
Which, I mean, you know, usually that's a precursor to sinking. That's usually the first step in sinking.
- [57:34]
Kathy Gellis
You certainly want to not load up and put everybody in your fireworks on the boat. That is taking, taking on water.
- [57:39]
Leo Laporte
So, yeah, we had The Petaluma fireworks 15, 15 minutes, right, Lisa? I. Unfortunately I was napping, so I missed. We'll have more in just a bit. I do want to talk about this copyright issue should. This is something you've talked about for. You taught me about the right to read and you've defended the right of AI, the rights of AIs to read books, just like we do ingest the contents of those books. Now there are conflicting court decisions about that from the same district, which is funny. We'll have that in just a little bit. You're watching this week in tech. We will get to many other stories, don't worry. There's one more court case then. That's all. That's all. Our show today, brought to you by Zscaler, the leader in cloud security, talking about AI. AI is a double edged sword, isn't it? Hackers are using AI to breach your organization better than ever, more effectively than ever. And at the same time, AI in your organization powers innovation, drives efficiency. So it helps bad actors deliver more relentless and effective attacks and helps you do better business. What do we do? How do we solve this? Phishing attacks over encrypted channels last year increased by 34.1%, fueled by the growing use of generative AI tools. They're much more effective, these phishing emails than ever before. But there's also this thing called phishing as a service, these kits, which means any kid with no skills at all can launch a phishing attack on the other hand, organizations in all industries from small to larger leveraging AI to increase employee productivity with public AI. Engineers with coding assistance, marketers with writing tools finances using AI to create spreadsheet formulas. It's kind of amazing. People are automating workflows for operational efficiency both across individuals and teams. They're embedding AI into their applications and services, both customer and partner facing ultimately, AI is helping so many companies, including ours I might add, move faster in the market and gain a competitive advantage. So we have this interesting environment where AI is both good and bad. There's no doubt companies have to really think about how they protect their private and public use of AI. You don't want to accidentally send proprietary information out into the world. They also have to really think about how they defend against AI powered attacks. This is nowhere more true than in school districts across the country. Chief Information Security Officer, the CISO from the New York City Department of Education biggest, I think the biggest school district in the country said with AI, I'm concerned about the usage of it, but I also love the innovation with it. How are our employees using AI? Which AIs are they using? He recommends Zscaler. He says Zscaler could be a good partner there to help us find the answers to those questions and help us move faster when it comes to incident response and finding the needle in the haystack. Proactively effectively finding threats to our network and data. Here's the problem with traditional security firewalls, you know, perimeter security and then you have to have a VPN so people can get in through the firewall. And then that gives you public facing IP addresses which expose you to and your attack surface to the to the bad guys lurking out there and you are no match for them in this AI era. That's why we need a modern approach. That's why you want Zscaler's comprehensive zero trust architecture plus AI that ensures safe public AI productivity, protects the integrity of private AI and stops AI powered attacks. It works on all levels. You can thrive in the AI era with Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI to stay ahead of the competition and remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn more more@Zscaler.com security that's Zscaler.com security we thank him so much for supporting this week in tech and supporting you in your AI journey. All right. I was happy when I saw Judge Alsop's ruling. Cathy. It was Bartz versus Anthropic. The issue was Anthropic had bought a bunch of books and ingested them into their AI models. But they also had a bunch of pirated books which they ingested into the AI models. After they were done with the books they purchased, they destroyed them. Judge Alsop came down with two answers to that question. On the one hand, he found that train this is important. There are four, as you know, there are four tests for fair use, one of which is transformational. He said training an AI system on unlicensed copyright works is easily transformative.
- [62:50]
Kathy Gellis
Fair use, I think he said, spectacularly transformative.
- [62:54]
Leo Laporte
It is because the book no longer exists, not even in the AI's memory. It's tokens, it's not language. He said buying the physical books and scanning them was transformative, unlicensed works, storing them long term as a library. That was infringing. In fact, they're going to go to trial on that. But he threw out the part of the case where they were being sued because of reading these books they purchased, potentially infringing.
- [63:26]
Kathy Gellis
I don't think it's a settled issue, but it wasn't passing the sniff test for him. And I think that's basically where his decision leaves stops at this point. But the case will, as you say, will go forward.
- [63:39]
Leo Laporte
When Jason Calacanis was on a couple of weeks ago, he talked about, promoted the idea. In fact, I think it's one of his investments of licensing these works to AI, because AI is ingesting them for profit in many cases and there should be some sort of licensing micropayment regime so that the authors get fairly compensated, the AI gets the content. He said the courts are all going to say it's not fair use. Well, almost immediately Judge Alsup proved him wrong. But. But that wasn't the only decision to come down from the Northern District of California. What was the other decision, Kath, a.
- [64:18]
Kathy Gellis
Couple days later was Kadri versus Mehta. And that one came from a different judge whose name I've never heard, so I don't know how to pronounce it. These two cases were a little bit weird and I think Mike's TechDirt post kind of points out a weirdness that, that Allsup's decision was a better one for AI training in general because it basically did an analysis that found it largely to be fair use, but it was a worse outcome for the defendant company. Anthropic.
- [64:53]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, because they're still going to go to trial over the.
- [64:54]
Kathy Gellis
They're still going to go to trial on some other pieces and it may be very expensive for them, but the Other case was Meta won, but. But it kind of lost because the overall decision is said basically like it's probably not fair use. And Meta really only won because he.
- [65:12]
Leo Laporte
For technicalities.
- [65:13]
Kathy Gellis
For technicalities that the way that the litigation had been pled and the plaintiffs had. Had written up everything didn't have enough evidence to win their argument.
- [65:23]
Leo Laporte
So it's interesting because Judge, and I'm going to say it, Chabria, C H H A B R I A Judge Chabria invoked a different one of the four tests, the impact on the market. You know, it's fair use if it's transformative. It's not fair use if it injures the financial prospects. If it has an impact on the market. Judge Jabria said this AI training does in fact affect the market. It's market.
- [65:55]
Kathy Gellis
Allsup didn't buy it.
- [65:58]
Leo Laporte
Allsup said it didn't affect the market. It's terrible.
- [66:01]
Kathy Gellis
So these.
- [66:03]
Leo Laporte
So what do we do now in the same district? These two judges have essentially opposing points of view.
- [66:10]
Kathy Gellis
I, I wonder if there's going to be appeal and the next thing we gotta do is they both go. No, no, they'll go to the 9th Circuit first. And in the 9th Circuit there's also more of a predilection to do rehearing and bank. So this is, I would say this is nowhere near the Supreme Court. It could, except Supreme Court has been changing things, so who the hell knows? But more than likely this is not. This is years away from hitting the Supreme Court.
- [66:34]
Leo Laporte
This is a fundamental question, though, and we've talked about it a number of times when you've been on our shows. Do AI have this? Does AI have the same rights to ingest music, art and literature that humans do? The right to read, which is apparently a First Amendment right. I didn't know that until I talk to you.
- [66:56]
Kathy Gellis
So one of the things that I don't like about the second decision, Kadri versus Meta, is that his view of the transformativeness seems to be connected very much to what the potential output of the AI is. And I think Allsups was a little bit more disciplined in terms of that. The training is the training and it's only about the slurping in the first instance and not based on what it might spit out at the end. And at the moment, I think the AI, like most of these LLMs, don't really spit out. Well, I guess it's. I don't know, actually, it may vary. I was going to say they don't spit out complete works, but that may not be true because some works are very big and some works are very small. So certainly for small ones, they can spit out a complete work. But his analysis of what was transformative about it seemed to have been really colored by the fact that the LLM could spit out something that looked like a copy. Whereas I think, also just in terms of the training was looking at, I think he split the issue in a way that I think needs to be split. You look at the slurping in the first instance and whether that is infringing on a copy of something that you're slurping into the AI in the first place. And I think he basically said no. His issues of where the liability would be were more based on, in this case, the separate acquisition of pirated materials. But that's a completely different question. I think William, also Judge Alsop was better in terms of breaking this down. And I don't like the Cadre decision because it tends to. I think it uses the output to color the analysis of the legality of the input. The second thing, and Mike pointed this out in his post, is market harm, and also said something that I think is really important that has been getting way too ignored by an awful lot of cases, including the Warhol case at the Supreme Court and the Internet Archive case, which is just because the copyright holder could have potentially made money. Like, if there's a licensing market for this, yeah, I guess the copyright holders would be able to get that money, but that doesn't mean that because they could get money, it's not fair use. That's not the way market harm is supposed to be defined. And also kind of said, timeout, everybody, back this up. Just because, you know, they'd be first in line to make the money doesn't mean they actually have a right to require the payment. That doesn't change whether it would be fair use or whether it's something that their actual copyrights would entitle them to be. Whereas the Cadre decision, it seems more in line with what Warhol and the Internet Archive case went to, which was, if there was money to be had, well, it must have gone to the. The copyright holders. And it doesn't really matter whether there was fair use or not, because they didn't get to make money that potentially they could have created a market for. And that is a very significant expansion of what a copyright can get somebody. And it's a significant reduction of what fair use is supposed to protect. And I think it's a huge problem. And I appreciate that the that the Allsup's decision sort of tried to put the brakes on that whole dynamic.
- [70:05]
Leo Laporte
But we, but we're a long way off from this being resolved. Years, probably before this gets resolved.
- [70:10]
Kathy Gellis
Yeah, certainly, certainly.
- [70:11]
Leo Laporte
Although there are some having to do with AI and the courts. Sidney Stein, who's the district judge in reviewing the New York Times versus ChatGPT, you may remember a few weeks ago we talked about the fact that the judge in that case had ordered ChatGPT to save all conversations with its users, and that even includes conversations the users have requested be deleted. This so that the New York Times could go through them and find infringing content. Sidney Stein, the judge reviewing the request that OpenAI said, hey, Judge, this is a problem for privacy. Stein immediately denied OpenAI's objections. He was, according to Ars Technica Ashley Belanger writing, seemingly unmoved by the company's claims that the order forced OpenAI to abandon long standing privacy norms. Steins suggested that OpenAI's user agreement said the data could be retained as part of a legal process. So that's exactly what's happening. Oh, there's some good news. Even if you say delete it, the New York Times can go through it. OpenAI says they plan to keep fighting the order, but I don't know exactly how they would continue to fight, except maybe go to the 2nd Circuit and appeal it and ask for an emergency order. But I don't know what the likelihood of that is.
- [71:44]
Kathy Gellis
It is a deeply troubling order.
- [71:46]
Leo Laporte
Deeply troubling.
- [71:47]
Kathy Gellis
Deeply troubling. Yeah. I haven't followed it since it first came out, but yeah, it's one of these, in theory, minor procedural things with enormous implications that I'm not entirely sure that the trial court judge necessarily was fully in tune with. So it may be something that ends up getting fully litigated, even though it's a minor collateral issue to the overall case.
- [72:12]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And I think you can make a strong case that it doesn't help the publisher's case to go through my logs and it certainly impacts my privacy and.
- [72:23]
Kathy Gellis
In ways that I think it was telling people it would be deleted and then it wasn't getting deleted and now it's not making.
- [72:30]
Leo Laporte
There is, I mean, the judge pointed out, look, this is, you agreed to this as a, as a company customer that in the case of a legal matter, those logs might be retained. So I guess you know that legally they have the right. But I think this is pretty appalling and I guess you, if your privacy is a concern, maybe don't use chat GPT, which of course is what Sam Altman's most worried about. Let's see. Microsoft, big layoffs. Here you go. A company that, that is consistently in the number one or two market cap in the world in history. A $3 trillion company, record profits the last quarter. They're laying off another 9,000 employees, 15,000 in total this year. More cuts coming to Microsoft. In this case, it's in the gaming division. Ironically, when Microsoft was being sued over the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, they said, oh, don't worry, these are independent companies. There won't be any overlap. We won't have to lay anybody off. Well, no, in fact, most of these layoffs are in that division, the gaming division.
- [73:45]
Nicholas De Leon
They've shut down a ton of studios. It is really not if you're a gamer, if you're someone who cares about this from the consumption. It's. It's like it's been a really bad acquisition. Like, no, what good.
- [73:56]
Leo Laporte
I was against it, you know, Paul Thurot was defending it, defending it. I said this is not good. This is, this is consolidating the market.
- [74:03]
Nicholas De Leon
And yeah, I mean, go ahead, go ahead.
- [74:07]
Leo Laporte
Microsoft's been a good steward of, of act. Of Minecraft, I guess you could say, right?
- [74:12]
Nicholas De Leon
Sure. Yes, yes, 100%, yes. Okay, but, but like, what about everything else? Arcane Studios, Perfect, Dark, they just shut down. Down. John Romero was developing a new game. Like, a lot of, a lot of funding was pulled for like games folks were looking, looking forward to. And I, I guess it's all in service of Game Pass. One interesting thing that I've seen come out of this over the past couple days is people now. And not just people, not just, you know, the peanut gallery, but developers publicly questioning whether or not Game Pass is sustainable, whether or not Game Pass is to blame for this. Because folks who don't know Game Pass is basically like the Netflix for games. So you pay, pay 20amonth for the highest tier thereabouts and you get access to a full catalog of brand new games, a library of older games, you know, more games than you have time on Xbox and on PC. And that sounds great, you know, if you're a consumer, hey, I have all these games and I pay $20 a month for my fee and I could play all day every day instead of having to pay $60 to play Doom, $60 to play Atlas Obscure, you know, instead of paying $60 a pop.
- [75:17]
Leo Laporte
That's why I subscribed. I don't play that many games, but I figured it pays for itself.
- [75:21]
Nicholas De Leon
Right.
- [75:22]
Leo Laporte
If I play one or two games a year.
- [75:24]
Nicholas De Leon
Exactly. So the question now is that, okay, that's fine, but are these game studios structured in a way where they're going to get, you know, I don't believe Microsoft has ever really set, explained how studios are paid or publishers are paid. How Spotify has like a very complex like system. It's not just oh, you get one stream and therefore you get another nickel. It's like your stream is thrown into like a bucket of streams and then we do some math to determine how many nickels you get.
- [75:50]
Leo Laporte
This is what happened in the music industry, right? This is why artists get so little money now from streaming on Spotify.
- [75:57]
Nicholas De Leon
And so folks are saying, is this sustainable if studios were structured, you know, 10, 15 years ago, hey, we're going to create video games, we're going to hire 100 people, we're going to sell this game for $60 after cost. We're going to make, we're going to make X. Okay, that's, that's fine. But now if they're selling fewer copies at $60 a pop and they're banking on some sort of ethereal game pass kickback from Microsoft, it's, it's, to me it's becoming clear that the math isn't mathing as the kids say. So we'll see, we'll see what happens. But like this is the first time that I've seen sustained conversation. One of the co founders of Arcane Studios, the guys who made Dishonored back in the day, was an excellent game. He came out and said, yeah, I don't know that game pass is really working anymore. So it's, it's an interesting, it's interesting and we're beginning to see some criticism of Phil Spencer who is the CEO of the Xbox division. I don't know how you're the CEO of a division in a company, but that's how that, that's what his title is. And, and like okay, this guy is supposed to be gamer friendly and you know, yada yada. What, what has happened over the past 10 years other than, than several studios shut down, games canceled like no, what good has come? The industry is in a really bad spot and it just seems to get worse and worse like with, with every month.
- [77:14]
Leo Laporte
So perfect dark. You mentioned Everwild, a first person shooter from Romero. This story from Bloomberg about Blackbird, which was a Zenimax game that apparently wowed executives when they saw it. Microsoft executives were blown away by it. They just canceled it.
- [77:36]
Nicholas De Leon
What is the Point of this? Why? Like, what's going on? I don't really, I really don't see people stepping back and saying, like, what is that? What are we actually doing here? They're just canceling games. Killing studios. For what? Like, for what?
- [77:51]
Leo Laporte
ZeniMax was one of the companies acquired in the Activision or actually prior to the Activision Blizzard acquisition edition, they were the company behind the Elder Scrolls Online, which was, by the way, my World of Warcraft. So I'm disappointed. And you know, these are games that have been in development for years. Literally. Yeah, yeah.
- [78:16]
Nicholas De Leon
Games today, that's, you know, there's, there, there's a lot. No, it's not a game show, but there's like a lot of discussions, like not only like the sustainability of like game path, but like just the game industry, the way games are made. Do we need, can we have 500 people working for 10 years? Like Grand Theft Auto 6 is going to come out, you know, I guess next year.
- [78:33]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [78:33]
Nicholas De Leon
That game would have been a development for 10 years easy. Hundreds of people that would have cost, take two Rockstar, hundreds of millions of dollars. Like this is crazy. Like, this is a lot of money for like an entertainment product, you know. So I, I, I don't know, I don't know what's going to happen, but everyone is like really nervous and, and like, hey, what are we doing here? What's going on? It's a very confusing time for the industry.
- [78:59]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Somebody in our chat room is pointing out that Expedition 33, the game we were Tapat's 010304, says Expedition 33, the game we were talking about earlier, took 30 people to make. Starfield has 300 people listed in the final credits.
- [79:16]
Nicholas De Leon
I don't want to say an indictment, but like, okay, if exhibition 33, which will probably win game of the year, I'm sure they've sold copies. Yeah, 30 people made that. I'm sure the budget was basically nothing compared to like Call of Duty or gta.
- [79:30]
Leo Laporte
It's like, okay, my favorite, my favorite game in the last few years. My, besides Animal Planet, my, my Covid game was Valheim. Very small studio, you know. And you know, it was like under two dozen people who created it.
- [79:48]
D
The thing is those, those are outliers. Like all the other game Studios that have 30, that have 30 employees aren't.
- [79:53]
Leo Laporte
Making that much dirty people.
- [79:55]
Nicholas De Leon
Yeah, sure, of course. Well, another thing I've seen, I've seen discussed is like people are just not especially younger people are not buying new games at the rate they Were like when I was 20 years old, let's say, you know, between Fortnite, between, you know, there's a couple of live service games that. Why would I buy a new game when I could just play GT online with my friends every night for free, you know, or, you know, for a very long. Why am I going to buy the new thing?
- [80:20]
Leo Laporte
The new thing.
- [80:21]
Nicholas De Leon
It's like I've already have Fortnite with my friends, so it's a weird. Like these live service games as they stick around. Like World of Warcraft costs money. I pay $15 a month, so they're making some money off of me. But a lot of these games are free to play and so it just. There's only so many hours in the day. It's like if I'm going to play two hours of Fortnite, then I probably don't need to buy, you know, the new Madden or whatever.
- [80:44]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [80:45]
Kathy Gellis
I don't want to give them more money when I own games that I bought it 20 years ago and I can't play them anymore.
- [80:51]
Leo Laporte
Isn't that frustrating?
- [80:52]
Kathy Gellis
Yeah, I mean, some of them I can because I've used gog.
- [80:58]
Leo Laporte
I was just gonna say good old games, baby.
- [81:00]
Kathy Gellis
But they're limited in terms of what they can offer. So I would like to play Age of Empires. I have a fully licensed virgin. Why can't I play it? And this doesn't put the morality of anti piracy on their side. I should give them more money now for another game that will not be able to survive. Mine. My equipment evolving.
- [81:20]
D
Kathy, you need to put on a Windows XP computer together is what you.
- [81:24]
Leo Laporte
Need to do, right?
- [81:26]
Kathy Gellis
Because there's certainly no. I'm not entirely sure it's the operating system. I think it has to do with something else. Like it just. It's like it doesn't compile itself properly and it needs a different runtime environment.
- [81:38]
Leo Laporte
Really interesting thing because movies, you know, a movie made in 1922 you can still watch today if it's been preserved and one hopes it has. They're considered a cultural treasure and we protect them. And games I think you could easily argue are equivalent and should be preserved.
- [81:56]
Kathy Gellis
And Kendra, Albert and others have gone to the Copyright office and the triennial rule makings for section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright act and said we need an exemption so we can preserve video games. And they keep not getting it. They may have gotten it in small ways, but I think they keep getting turned down, which is ridiculous. They're absolutely right that this is a part of our culture and it should be archivable and they're not getting traction on that and this is just silly.
- [82:27]
Leo Laporte
My question is what's with the layoffs at Microsoft which is arguably the most, one of the most profitable companies in the world in history? What's with the layoffs? Is this how you become more profitable? Is this over hire?
- [82:43]
Nicholas De Leon
The reasons I've seen is that they've over everyone hire. Well that's one thing you hear all the time.
- [82:48]
Leo Laporte
Oh we, everybody over hired during company.
- [82:50]
Nicholas De Leon
Okay, sure, whatever. Fine. I know, you know, let's get rid of layers of management. I feel like AI is the thing that's kind of looming in the background. It's like, well, do we really need 100 mid managers to check on someone. Hey, did you finish that thing I asked you to do? When, when, when co pilot can do this.
- [83:07]
Leo Laporte
I don't mind firing middle managers. I think that's fine.
- [83:10]
Kathy Gellis
I have heard somewhere and now I can't remember where I, I was. So for all I know it was the last time I was on the show. But that there was a change in the tax code.
- [83:21]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, this was, we talked about this. So this is something that was put in the Trump tax bill last term but because it wasn't revenue neutral, they put it off. But basically companies used to be able to amortize the costs of their R and D to spread it out over five years. And that includes programs, programmers, that includes people writing video games. That's R D. The tax code changed in 2022 to say you cannot write it off over five years. You have to, you have to do it in one year. Which is a significant difference in the tax bill for these companies. They have thousands of programmers and suddenly their salaries are not, cannot be spread. So that's a, that's a big deal. And so Maybe that section 174 is the reason I, I keep bringing that up to people like Paul Thurat on Windows Weekly and they poo poo it. So I don't know enough about this business to know, but I don't know either.
- [84:22]
Kathy Gellis
But the fact that ever since you put that in my brain and I've just been seeing like this massive slashing of so many people.
- [84:31]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [84:31]
Kathy Gellis
When the company is so profitable, like it does feel very weird.
- [84:35]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [84:36]
D
I wonder what the CEO's pay and his bonus look like.
- [84:40]
Kathy Gellis
Well, somebody put in the chat what it looked like.
- [84:42]
D
I think that probably looks like a lot of people's pallory there.
- [84:46]
Leo Laporte
By the way, during the, you know, debate over the Big, beautiful, whatever the hell it was. That was one of the issues people were talking about. Could we. Could we, you know, extend that deadline? I don't think it did get extended. So in 2017, the tax cuts and Jobs act removed the option immediately deduct R and D expenses starting in 2022. So you could deduct. I reversed it. You could deduct it immediately, like the same year, which is better for you than saying, oh, we're going to have to spread that cost out over five years. So I reversed it. It's better to deduct it in the year that you pay it than to spread it out. It now has to be spread out. And that is at least some people's explanation of why all of these tech layoffs in the last two years. After that, I think we're going to.
- [85:44]
Nicholas De Leon
Start also seeing criticism. I've seen some commentary online. I don't know that I've seen a whole lot in mainstream press is the use of H1B visas. Like, if you're a. If you're Microsoft and you're laying off 9,000 people, should you really then also have like 5,000 thousand H1B visa applications out this year? People are beginning to be like, I don't know that that makes a ton of sense.
- [86:08]
Kathy Gellis
I'm not entirely sure in theory. The H1B visas, I think, also have to be recruited domestically as well. But I certainly don't want to throw more fuel on the immigration policy fires by complaining about that. The issues are far more complex in terms of exploitation and freedom and moving and.
- [86:29]
Nicholas De Leon
Yeah, I guess we'll see. I have seen some commentary like this is. This is weird. Is anyone.
- [86:35]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, so.
- [86:36]
Kathy Gellis
And I say this also as somebody who was a tech employee, immigrant out. I went to Europe as a tech employee, so I had sort of the reverse experience. And it was nice to be able to have that experience.
- [86:54]
Leo Laporte
Let's see. All right, well, enough. Enough about Microsoft. Microsoft so far. How about TikTok? You want to talk about TikTok? Let's take a break and we'll talk about TikTok next. Because TikTok lives on. Despite Congress making a law against it, despite the Supreme Court upholding that law, TikTok lives on. It's a puzzlement. It really is.
- [87:21]
Kathy Gellis
Oh, a puzzle, yes. What could possibly be doing this?
- [87:25]
Leo Laporte
Why? Why? That's what everyone wants to know, why. But we'll get to that in just a moment. Kathy Gellis is here, attorney at law. I guess you probably gathered that contributor at Tector, also a senior Electronics reporter for Consumer Reports, the wonderful Nicholas De Leon. We visited Nicholas and Ashley in Tucson when we were down there for the gem and mineral show. So much fun. I want to do that again next year. Yeah, really, really fun down there. Really had a great time. Our show today, brought to you by Miro. We talked about Miro before. Miro, you know, stands behind the creative companies, the creative people. Every day, new headlines speculate about how AI is coming for our jobs, fostering anxiety and fear. But a recent survey from Miro tells a different story. Yes, 76% believe that AI can benefit their role. 54% struggle to know when to use use it. Enter Miro's Innovation Workspace. I've talked about this before, it is so cool. But they have added AI to this. Now it's an intelligent platform that brings people and AI together in a shared space to get great work done, to foster your creativity, not to stop it. Miro has been empowering teams to transform bold ideas into the next big thing for over a decade. They're really an outstanding company with an amazing product. Today they are literally at the forefront of bringing products to market even fast, faster. By unleashing the combined power of AI and human potential in a way that works for humans, for real people, for real creatives, Miro's Innovation Workspace will help your teams be faster, more effective. Here's how teams can work with Miro AI to turn unstructured data stuff. They just encourages you to just throw everything in there, sticky notes, screenshots, whatever, you know, ideas, thoughts, middle of the night jottings and put it in there and turn it into usable diagrams, product briefs, data tables and prototypes in minutes. It's more than just, you know, a mood board. Putting a bunch of ideas on a board. You can now rapidly iterate with your teammates to take what is essentially a mood board and bring it to life as a real working idea fast. You can quickly build on your ideas without needing the perfect question or prompt. You know, that's always been a thing. I think that's gotten in the way. When you're using these chatbots, wouldn't you love to just be able to throw everything you've thought and all your ideas up there and work iteratively? With an AI, you don't have to be an AI master. You don't have to toggle yet another tool. The work you're already doing on Miro's canvas becomes the prompt. Isn't that brilliant? Brilliant. Help your teams get great done with Miro. Check out miro.com to find out how. That's m I r o dot com. In fact, chances are, like us, many of you probably already have many Miro boards with lots of information in there. Now you can take that and turn it into, in effect a prompt and build something amazing with Miro's Innovation Workspace. Give it a try@miro.com we thank Miro, longtime sponsor. We appreciate it. It's good to have you back, Miro. Something we've, we've loved for a long time. All right, TikTok. Actually, there, there has been a very interesting revelation in the tick tock story. You remember that TikTok was banned by Congress. The deadline for TikTok to either be sold to US company or banned in the United States was January 19th of this year. The day before inauguration, TikTok actually went down for about a minute and then President Trump said, no, no, no, no. It extended the time limit for 90 days and then again for 90 days. Are we on our second or third extension? We're going to go through September now. But in response to the law, companies like Apple and Google, reasonably concerned about their liability, pulled TikTok off their app store. Well, it turns out they put it back thanks to letters they received from the Attorney General, Pam Bondi. And now we know what the contents of those letters are. Letters were disclosed in a Freedom of Information act request made by a guy who's a software engineer and a Google shareholder. He's suing Google for not complying with a TikTok video ban, which is, which is fascinating. So to, you know, the, you know, the Attorney General is basically saying, don't worry about law, schmaw, quote. The President has determined that an abrupt shutdown of the TikTok platform would interfere. This is key, by the way, with the execution of the President's constitutional duties to take care of the national security and foreign affairs of the United States States. Now, many would say it's the exact opposite, Right.
- [92:38]
Kathy Gellis
But he has a duty to take care to make sure that the laws of the United States are faithfully executed.
- [92:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah.
- [92:46]
Kathy Gellis
And here is a law, however dumbly put on the books and dumb.
- [92:52]
Leo Laporte
You argued against that law, but I.
- [92:54]
Kathy Gellis
Argued against that law. It is, it is a bad law. It is not constitutional based on any understanding we ever had prior to January 2020. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court said, yeah, go ahead. But it's the law. It's on the books. It may be a bad, unconstitutional law, but he still has to uphold it. And nowhere does the law give him the ability to say yeah, no, I don't think it's a good idea, even.
- [93:19]
Leo Laporte
If it happens to be right, that she's saying it's part of his constitutional duties. Because hasn't the Supreme Court essentially indemnified him for any act that he pursues in pursuit of his constitutional duty duties? I think there's a reason those words are in there.
- [93:36]
Kathy Gellis
There may be. I can't there. I think there's one good lawyer floating around the White House who, when they get a chance to actually lawyer something, starts to be kind of clever about things. But there's also a whole bunch of bad lawyers around there or people who are making decisions.
- [93:51]
Leo Laporte
I won't ask you what you think of the Attorney General Bondi. So after the first extension, there was a second extension, extension and a second letter after Trump gave TikTok another 75 day reprieve in which the attorney General said, quote, the Department of Justice is also irrevocably, irrevocably relinquishing any claims the United States might have had against them. In other words, you can put it back in your app store. We pinky swear that we will not sue you. This is the third pause, by the way.
- [94:32]
Kathy Gellis
I think there's a very big legal question of whether she can bind the United States to.
- [94:37]
Leo Laporte
It's irrevocable. She said it's irrevocable.
- [94:40]
Kathy Gellis
Yeah. I mean, because she will not be. I mean, we've got bigger problems. If this is wrong. She will not be in power. He will not be in power. There will be another president and another attorney general who has the ability and the power and the obligation to enforce the laws and gets to do it under their own political judgment and prosecutorial discretion. And right now, in theory, they're violating the law that she just happens to bless. Now maybe the lawyers at these companies are like, we've got, we'll have some serious reliance harms if somebody else tries to prosecute us for breaking this law right now. Now. But, but they're breaking the law right now. And it is not clear that she can exonerate themselves for any of this, you know, wrongdoing as.
- [95:29]
Leo Laporte
Isn't that historic at all?
- [95:31]
Kathy Gellis
Just other than okay, I guess she kind of.
- [95:33]
Leo Laporte
You should be celebrating. You didn't want the TikTok to be banned in the first place.
- [95:37]
Kathy Gellis
I can't celebrate. No, I didn't. But I can't celebrate this because I don't want lawlessness, that there's, there's no port in the storm.
- [95:45]
Leo Laporte
The law is what the president says it Is.
- [95:47]
Kathy Gellis
No, no, not in this country.
- [95:50]
Leo Laporte
Well, okay, if you say so. TikTok, by the way, two.
- [95:56]
Kathy Gellis
Two wrongs do not make a right.
- [95:58]
Leo Laporte
I know.
- [95:58]
Kathy Gellis
You know, you can't violate the Constitution by violent. You can't unviolate the Constitution by violating the Constitution. There. Therein lies madness.
- [96:06]
Leo Laporte
The company TikTok is. Is actually going to. Is creating a new app for September 5, known as M2. According to the Information, the current TikTok app is known as M. So M2 would be the next one. Eventually. Under the plan, TikTok users will have to download the new app to be able to continue using the service at least until March of next year. You can use the old app. Why are they migrating them to a new app? Because, according to the information, the Trump administration says it's getting close to the sale of TikTok to a U.S. u.S. Company. Under the deal, a consortium of non Chinese investors, including Oracle, is expected to buy TikTok's US business while ByteDance retains a minority stake. That's the Chinese company, we gotta point out. The Chinese government has kind of weighed in on this. They have to approve the deal. I believe Trump is using this in the tariff negotiations, or maybe it's vice versa. He's using the tariff negotiations to force this sale. I don't know exactly what's going on. It is, the information points out, highly unusual for an app of TikTok size to ask users to download a new app and then use it. It's risky. Yeah, I know. Yeah. I mean, I can't think of a time that's happened before where it's like, okay, don't use our app now. We got to use this new app. App.
- [97:37]
Nicholas De Leon
No, I remember I was at the Daily, which is the News Corp. IPad.
- [97:43]
Leo Laporte
Oh, my God. Built this giant newsroom. He did.
- [97:47]
Nicholas De Leon
Oh, it was a very nice. It was a very nice newsroom.
- [97:50]
Leo Laporte
Modern newsroom.
- [97:51]
Nicholas De Leon
Yeah, it was super, super nice. And it lasted about a little under three years. And that. That's all she wrote. Anyhow. We had a gadget guide, and it was this bespoke app that we made from scratch. Kind of like you would read like. Like a Wired magazine or like a gq, like, gift guide for the holidays. Oh, you should buy the iPhone. You should buy this. You is its own dedicated app. The second year. So we had the app one year. The second year, we were like, should we make a new app? Should we just update the old app? The number of hours that went into, like, that decision. Eventually it was decided, no, we'll just upgrade the old app, because there's no way people are going to download a second app for the same thing. Right, so exactly to your point.
- [98:31]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [98:31]
Kathy Gellis
I mean, I think there's a universe where that could happen, but I don't think that TikTok lives in that universe, given that people are already unhappy with it, thinking that. That what they liked about it is already being messed with.
- [98:44]
Leo Laporte
You know, it's funny, First Amendment issues aside, the right of the US Government to force a sale aside, Jason Calacanis said something very interesting and actually fairly convincing to me about the usefulness of TikTok to the Chinese Communist Party. He said, do you think if we Americans could force Chinese users to use an app that we designed in the hundreds of millions or billions, that we wouldn't go ahead and do that? Yeah, it makes sense. It is in a way, a Trojan horse. Whether they're using it that way or not, it exists. It convinced me that perhaps TikTok doesn't have the best interests of the United States at heart, despite the President's support for it.
- [99:35]
Kathy Gellis
I. I never would have presumed that they did. I just don't think that that's operative and certainly to the extent that it might be operative.
- [99:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [99:45]
Kathy Gellis
Again, now means testing matters. Narrow tailoring of if you're going to have law collide with something that is otherwise, you know, nobody. And this came up in all argument that Politico is owned by Germans and they may not have the. The best interests of America at heart. The New York Times may not have the best interests of America at heart. Like America may not have the best interest of America at heart. And that is not operative in normal circumstances for whether you get to have a First Amendment right to exist as a platform.
- [100:17]
Leo Laporte
But we do have. I mean, there's Cepheus. There is some mechanism in the government to prevent foreign ownership of US Companies.
- [100:31]
Kathy Gellis
So the stuff is either very, very narrowly tailored, so it doesn't have collateral effects, or it may be unconstitutional as well, and we've just kind of let it slide. But that's not a reason that we should let it have.
- [100:42]
Leo Laporte
If the Constitution makes it possible for our enemies to use our freedoms against us, maybe we should amend that. Doesn't that seem like a dangerous thing, especially in this modern world? World?
- [100:59]
Kathy Gellis
No. I mean, especially as we may or may not be happy with our current leadership and want to make sure that we can reach out and be spoken to by allies or former allies around the world like we couldn't get it. Also came up an oral argument we couldn't get the BBC. If this is the rationale for. Just because it's a foreign ownership. Again, I'm not necessarily saying that you can't do that. China is an adversary, but you have to narrow tailoring. What is it about China. China doing that you're afraid of? And you narrowly tailor the law to that. You can't just say, well, China doesn't like us and they were all using their app. That's not enough because that's too broad. And look at all the collateral damage to American rights that has happened as a result of it. It has to be something much more specific in terms of what the law is supposed to do in order to prevent whatever harm that we're afraid of.
- [101:49]
Leo Laporte
This may end up being moot. As Marcus says in our YouTube chat, forcing the sale of TikTok to American company without killing. Killing it is going to be very difficult if you add on top of that, oh, and by the way, you got to download the new American TikTok app. I think that puts TikTok in jeopardy, especially with Instagram hovering over the bones like a vulture. I don't know if TikTok could survive it anyway. Right. Maybe that's. Maybe market. Maybe market forces are the best way to put TikTok out of business.
- [102:18]
Kathy Gellis
Well, it always was.
- [102:20]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [102:20]
Nicholas De Leon
Is TikTok still as dumb? I feel like I've been here. I'm not a. I have never used TikTok to be clear, but I feel like I've been hearing it talked about like this new hot thing for almost 10 years.
- [102:30]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Not anymore. No. Yeah. You know, I don't. I don't have any numbers to back this up. My son is a TikTok star. Two and a half million followers.
- [102:38]
Nicholas De Leon
Right.
- [102:39]
Leo Laporte
He quite wisely. I, I strongly encouraged it too. Also has an account on Instagram. It's not quite as big. It's a million and a half followers and YouTube and YouTube shorts. I mean, he's try. I said don't be dependent on any platform. He doesn't. TikTok never made him much money. Even this, despite the size of his market.
- [103:02]
Nicholas De Leon
Really?
- [103:03]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. You know, he, he has sponsors, but nothing through TikTok. TikTok had a creator's fund and stuff. I don't think he saw much out of that. So Instagram's just. From his point of view, Instagram's just as good without any of the. The problems. Now I notice he still posts on both platforms.
- [103:20]
Nicholas De Leon
Right.
- [103:20]
Leo Laporte
But it's kind of my sense that the American public is more in love. Loves Instagram now?
- [103:27]
Nicholas De Leon
Yeah, Because, I mean, I've been hearing about Tick Tock is like these kids, but for, like, almost 10 years. I remember I was sitting at, like, the Vice office talking about TikTok. I was like, that was a long time ago.
- [103:37]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [103:38]
Nicholas De Leon
Apps are usually not, like, hip and cool for forever, right?
- [103:42]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. No, look at Facebook.
- [103:44]
Kathy Gellis
It's exactly. It doesn't have to be at the level of hip and cool to still be enormous with a large influence.
- [103:52]
Nicholas De Leon
I was just curious, like, that's still a thing. I sound like an old man. Is that still a thing? The kids, like, the TikTok used to download.
- [103:59]
Kathy Gellis
We couldn't upload more than four seconds at a time. It was a Vine.
- [104:03]
Leo Laporte
And we, like, remember Vines, Whatever happened. Oh, good old. Oh, yeah, that's right. Instagram. I mean, Twitter killed it, didn't it?
- [104:10]
Kathy Gellis
Yeah.
- [104:11]
Leo Laporte
Um, okay. All right, let's. I guess that's all there is to be said about that. We'll watch with interest and see how many more times the President can extend it. Because I really, honestly, I don't think the Chinese government's going to say yes to this. I mean, it's certainly. It's. It's a. It is a pawn, and they territory, tariff, battle back.
- [104:38]
Kathy Gellis
It's a pawn, but at this point, there's no leverage like a pawn.
- [104:42]
Leo Laporte
It has very little value in the game. Somebody said, just rename it USA Talk and it'll be. It'll be big. That's what they'll do. Of course. USA Talk. Or is it tick? Usa. No, that's not good. USA Talk.
- [104:59]
Nicholas De Leon
Powered by Oracle.
- [105:01]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah, Oracle's running Oracle. This is Project Texas. Oracle's been running this server for TikTok in the US for US citizens for a couple of years now. That was done. The question really, though, was, well, with Chinese ownership, how do you prevent the Chinese government from at some point tapping on the shoulders and saying, hey, we want to see that. Let's see that. Or maybe you should promote this story. Or not promote. There's no Tiananmen Square content on TikTok, that's for sure. So there's definitely some influence being exposed, asserted. All right, let's pause for station identification. You're watching this week in Tech, Nicholas De Leon. Have you set a date?
- [105:46]
Nicholas De Leon
Yes. December. Soon. Soon.
- [105:49]
Leo Laporte
When the snow is falling in Tucson.
- [105:52]
Nicholas De Leon
We're not kids, Leos. We're just gonna get this over with.
- [105:54]
Leo Laporte
Get it over with. No, Come on. You guys are kids. Are you kidding? You're young. You young. You, you, you thinking about A family or.
- [106:04]
Nicholas De Leon
No, I, I, we're still discussing. I know we want a, A small wedding. We don't really want, like, a million people there.
- [106:12]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, Lisa and I will bring cake. How about that? We'll bring cake.
- [106:19]
Nicholas De Leon
That's fine by me.
- [106:19]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Okay. Or a pie or something. I'll bring bagels. I'm very good at that. Also. Kathy. Guy Ellis. Great to have you, Kathy. Techdirt.com and of course, cgcouncil. C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com and she's on Blue sky. Are you a blue skyer. Still. Do you still do a lot of blue skying?
- [106:38]
Kathy Gellis
Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I, you don't.
- [106:40]
Leo Laporte
Do you buy into the narrative that blue sky's dying? No, no, that was nonsense.
- [106:46]
Kathy Gellis
Yeah, no, it's, it's usually articulated by people who have things to say that a lot of people really don't want to hear and have tuned out, and they're kind of. But I'm in an echo chamber. Nobody can hear me, so therefore, it's dying.
- [107:01]
Leo Laporte
Go back to Twitter. It's okay that you'll be welcome there. I haven't. It's funny. It wasn't as hard as I thought to break the Twitter habit. There definitely was a Twitter habit, and for a while, I was struggling with it. But he just takes off your phones and you forget about it. And every time I go there, I.
- [107:18]
Kathy Gellis
Go, oh, it took Blue sky a while until it could be big enough that it replaced my Twitter habit. There's certain things that I miss. Like, I like that Twitter was ubiquitous enough that when something happened, like, if I heard sirens, I could Google where I heard the siren, or I could, I could search on Twitter for where I heard the sirens and probably find out what was going on.
- [107:45]
Leo Laporte
That's amazing.
- [107:46]
Kathy Gellis
Blue sky closer, but it's not there yet. And it's real deficit because I don't know where to go for that kind of, you know.
- [107:53]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, we don't have that Internet dial tone. That's what, that's what Twitter was. It was.
- [107:57]
Kathy Gellis
Yeah. So I missed that. But in terms of, you know, I have a thought and I want to put it in the world, you know, it mostly scratches the itch. Maybe not exactly the way it did before, but it's getting there.
- [108:09]
Leo Laporte
I no longer have any thoughts, so maybe that's why I don't.
- [108:12]
Kathy Gellis
We all have podcasts, so you don't talk all day.
- [108:15]
Leo Laporte
I'm so sick of myself.
- [108:17]
Kathy Gellis
I have.
- [108:17]
Leo Laporte
Enough, Enough. Stop talking.
- [108:20]
Nicholas De Leon
I remember Years ago I used to listen to the Ron and Fez radio show.
- [108:24]
Leo Laporte
Ron and Fez. Oh yeah.
- [108:26]
Nicholas De Leon
Rom would be like why would I want a Twitter? I'm on the air four hours a day. All I do is talk. I don't always amaze me communicate anymore.
- [108:33]
Leo Laporte
Did you ever listen to Art Bell?
- [108:36]
Nicholas De Leon
A couple times. A couple times?
- [108:37]
Leo Laporte
Crazy late night guy from Nevada. He was nationally syndicated. Talked about UFO, UFOs and Sasquatch and stuff. He would get off the air after broadcasting all night and go into his hamshack and get on the radio and talk to hams for four or five more hours.
- [108:52]
Nicholas De Leon
Yeah, that's dedication.
- [108:53]
Kathy Gellis
No, I needed that sentence to continue because I just got hamshack and I needed more details because the place you hang your hands. Exactly. I mean they have some really nice like you know, they do this in Europe with the Jambon de Paris and ham shack.
- [109:11]
Leo Laporte
That would be a country ham if you've been hanging that in your ham shack.
- [109:15]
Kathy Gellis
Yeah, sorry. I'm glad you finished your sentence. The rest of it made sense and suddenly that image changed and turned into something else.
- [109:21]
Leo Laporte
Amateur radio enthusiast Actually we just had the big amateur radio day. Was, was it last week or the week before all the amateurs go out and they, they field day and they set up because you know, know you may not think it's important but when there's a national disaster and the phone networks are down, electricity's out, the hams are there.
- [109:41]
Kathy Gellis
I was told that like just a couple weeks ago that I should go get my license because I did. I did a community emergency response drill and I, and I took the position of being the radio operator and I really enjoyed it. I was really good. I'm a good project manager. I'm really good, good at being linear. I'm really good at like this is coming in and this is going out and I'm going to definitely pinging you until I get what I need. And I enjoyed it. And the person who was training me up was like, so you like this? You should go do more. So we'll see.
- [110:14]
Leo Laporte
Get the tech. Go to arrl.org the amateurradiorelayleague.org you can find out where they're giving the test in your area. The technician license is very to get, you don't need any Morse code. I have a general license. There's lots of study materials online. It's easy to do and yeah, that's for cert for being emergency response. It's so important. And you can actually with a technician license you can Get a handy talkie that you have in your house and you can be of great value to your community. In the case of emergency, highly recommend it. There are lots of classes. You can go here and find a class, take practice exams and you know what, Kathy? With your brains, it's going to be a snap. You'd be ready to take the exam in a few days. I think it's worth it. It's fun.
- [111:09]
Kathy Gellis
I think I have some friends who are doing it, so I should run this idea past them.
- [111:12]
Leo Laporte
If you do it together. I have. Well, I have a lot of. I have Gordon West's audio CD and his books and stuff. He's got. Got great teaching material. He used to be one of the hosts of our Ham Nation show, which you're right, now that I mention it, should really have been about Hamoni Barrico. Not about amateur radio, but okay.
- [111:31]
Kathy Gellis
The ham shack was really like the thing that popped into my brain was did not involve electronics.
- [111:37]
Leo Laporte
I want to hang some hams in my ham shack, man.
- [111:41]
Nicholas De Leon
I know in February there's a big ham you the Yuma Ham Fest in Yuma.
- [111:46]
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah.
- [111:46]
Nicholas De Leon
Which is not too far from, I guess the three of us. I might go that.
- [111:51]
Kathy Gellis
I still need more information about what kind of ham we're talking about for that.
- [111:55]
Nicholas De Leon
You know what? That's a mystery. For the. For the.
- [111:58]
Leo Laporte
Isn't it funny that we call amateur radios hams? I'm not sure. Amateur radio.
- [112:03]
Kathy Gellis
I'm sure there's a etymology for it that would explain that.
- [112:06]
Leo Laporte
I'm sure.
- [112:06]
Kathy Gellis
And I'm sure I used to know it and now I'm feeling kind of embarrassed I don't currently know it.
- [112:11]
Leo Laporte
Well, when you take your test, they might ask that. So I would. I would figure that out.
- [112:17]
Kathy Gellis
I don't like when I don't know something, especially if it's something I once did know.
- [112:22]
Leo Laporte
Well, you know what? That's why we got AI. Let me just ask.
- [112:26]
Kathy Gellis
Perplexity. No, I do need to point out that my team won first place of the Eff Pub trivia for cyber law last month.
- [112:35]
Leo Laporte
Well, I'm not surprised you were a ringer.
- [112:39]
Kathy Gellis
I mean my team was. I think we were six women and another guy we knew and we just clean up.
- [112:44]
Leo Laporte
Were you all attorneys? Attorneys?
- [112:47]
Kathy Gellis
Yes. I think yes. No, they were mostly attorneys too.
- [112:55]
Leo Laporte
The term ham for amateur radio operators originated as a pejorative slang used by professional and commercial telegraph and radio operators in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It referred to an operator who was unskilled or ham fisted. Ah, Ah, I was hoping for a cool acronym.
- [113:17]
Kathy Gellis
No, I don't know if I like.
- [113:18]
Leo Laporte
That bad, but a lot of English.
- [113:20]
D
Words used to be disses.
- [113:22]
Kathy Gellis
Yeah, that's true.
- [113:23]
Leo Laporte
Over time, amateur radio enthusiasts embraced the term ham, transforming it from a insult into a badge of honor.
- [113:31]
Nicholas De Leon
That's like blogger back in the day. Oh, he's a blogger.
- [113:34]
Leo Laporte
Blogger, podcaster, AI podcaster. Still a exactly you podcaster. Tom's basement is jammies talking to himself. I love it. We're going to take a break. Come back with more. Kathy Gellis. Nicholas, great to have you listening to this Week in Tech, the week's tech news. All right, I got a question for all of you. This episode of this Week in Tech is brought to you by Oracle. In business, they say you can have better, cheaper or faster. Faster. But you only get to pick two. What if you could have all three at the same time? That's exactly what Cohere, Thompson, Reuters, and Specialized Bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, development, and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds. How is it faster? OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second cheaper. OCI costs up to 50% less for compute, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking.
- [114:59]
D
Better.
- [115:00]
Leo Laporte
In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds. This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads right now with zero commitment. Try OCI for free. Head to oracle.com twit that's oracle.com twit thank you, Oracle, for supporting this Week in Tech and the budding amateur radio operators, dare I call them hams in our.
- [115:33]
Kathy Gellis
I've got a question then for you, Leo. Yes. When you're out and about in the wider world and you describe yourself as a podcaster, do people always understand what you mean?
- [115:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they do. Now everybody knows what a podcast is and. But then they say, like Joe Rogan. And I say, no, not like Joe Rogan. No, he's successful. You know.
- [115:56]
Kathy Gellis
Right. That. That is the soul delineating feature between you and him.
- [116:03]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, no, it used to be a little bit pejorative, but, you know, after shows like Serial, with mass success and I think probably now about half, I think it's 43% of Americans listen to at least one podcast every month, so it's pretty widespread now. It Didn't. In the early days, nobody knew what I was, was argued.
- [116:23]
D
I was actually 4th of July with my family. And a lot of them, a lot of those people aren't tech savvy. Like most of them don't, you know, don't. Don't know much about what's going on in the tech world. A lot of them get their news from podcasts now. And that's something I found interesting. I was like, well, you all listen to podcasts now, huh? Okay, that's funny.
- [116:38]
Leo Laporte
Media has changed dramatically. I think more people than ever before, maybe even more than networks watch YouTube on their TV. That's where they get information and entertainment. It's really quite a dramatic shift. And I don't know what it means, but I have to say that as I get older, this is one of the things when I was young, old people would always say in my day, well, now I kind of understand things really do change. I get the sense that they change faster now than ever before. But maybe that's just me. What do you youngsters think?
- [117:18]
Kathy Gellis
I mean, I'm not sure that that's necessarily true. And I'm thinking of something that just was kicked about on Blue sky the other day, which was Leah Thompson from Back to the Future. Yeah, that's her last name. Was saying how the difference. The whole movie of going back 30 years from 85 to 55 was so striking. And she said that if we went back 30 years from now, now it wouldn't be as striking. And some people ended up sort of debating that. And I think what they ended up saying is that visually we might not be strikingly different, but in terms of the addition of digital things and the post 911 fallout on culture, we're still, you know, there's still a giant gap between that.
- [118:00]
Leo Laporte
Think about it. In 1995, 30 years ago, the Internet was just getting started, right. So it wasn't widespread at all. And even if it was, you had to access it with a thing you put on the phone and.
- [118:11]
Kathy Gellis
And he went, not by then, by 95. That is almost actually kind of the key level update.
- [118:17]
Leo Laporte
That was when it turned.
- [118:18]
Nicholas De Leon
I agree.
- [118:18]
Kathy Gellis
That's when it turned.
- [118:19]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I agree. I remember, you know, 95, I was working for MSNBC doing a show called the Site. And I remember, I'll give you a really good example. I did one of the first national media coverage of the MP3 phenomenon. A friend of mine who was a. I had worked with him since he was a teenager, said, hey, I'm in college now. Glenn Rubenstein, he said, I'm in college now and you know, everybody, nobody's buying music anymore. We're all doing these things called MP3s, and they're servers and everybody puts all their, you know, digitizes their CDs, puts it on there. You don't have to buy music anymore. And I remember doing, I'm sure it was the first time this had ever been covered on network television. A story about MP3 now that's a hu. Since then, people. And this is what we were talking about on that music thing that we did a couple of weeks ago with Steven Witt. Since then, the music industry has changed 180 degrees. It's all digital. Nobody buys music anymore. They rent it. That's a huge change. And I gotta tell you, AI means that the next 30 years, well, even the next five years are gonna be very, very, I think, very, very different. Not to mention climate change.
- [119:38]
Nicholas De Leon
I don't know.
- [119:38]
Leo Laporte
I think things are changing faster than ever before. I really do. If, you know, a hundred years ago, thirty years back didn't change anything really.
- [119:48]
Kathy Gellis
None of us have the ability to really gauge this though, because when we're younger, time takes longer. And now that we're older, time is faster, so. But now we're older, so we're looking back, oh, everything is so fast now, but, oh, it was so slow.
- [120:01]
Leo Laporte
95, somebod Pat's saying this. In 95, monitors were this big and weighed 50 pounds. When the thin screen, flat screen monitors changed everything. Look at your TV today compared to your TV in 1995, that's a big change. When's the last time you went into a bank?
- [120:19]
Kathy Gellis
I go to the bank all the time.
- [120:21]
Leo Laporte
Well, you're a weirdo. Most people. I haven't been in a bank in years.
- [120:25]
Kathy Gellis
That's true too. But I still think that we should go to the bank.
- [120:31]
Leo Laporte
I mean, ATMs changed everything. ATMs were around in 95. Actually, they were already pretty widespread.
- [120:38]
Kathy Gellis
In 2000, I had my first cell phone. And the first one I bought was a Nokia, the little chocolate bar. It was like the 8100 or something like that. And I went and I visited my grandmother who was born in 1910. And I was showing it to her and I'm like, can you believe that this is my phone? And I was like, having her tell me what she remembered about phones. And like, she growing up in like a tenement in the Lower east side, where the phone was down the street, right? So I just sort of thinking that in her lifetime, look What? Look what happened.
- [121:11]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, and I mean, look at the first iPhone was 2007. So we are coming up on the.
- [121:17]
Nicholas De Leon
20, almost 20 years.
- [121:18]
Leo Laporte
That's going to be interesting. Yeah, that has been a massive change. You now have the world's information in your pocket.
- [121:25]
Kathy Gellis
But think about also things like air, like flight. Like, flight is barely over 100 years old. Jet travel is 1960s in terms of being common. So maybe we've got 60 years of that. Space travel, you know, time is, you know, we're adding on the decades, but it's still, it's a flip of an eye. I think it's what's actually interesting for sort of gaining this is to talk to older people who are still rolling along with technology. Like, like a 90 year old who's using email and a smartphone. I count, I'm a senior, even, even older than that. And just to ask like, you know.
- [122:07]
Leo Laporte
Somebody for whom I appreciate that, even.
- [122:10]
Kathy Gellis
Older than that, like 90 year olds who I know who use email and Facebook and smartphones. And sometimes it's actually really difficult because when you're that age, the dexterity, mobility and the vision is a huge deterrent for a lot of people using it. But for people who have been able to sort of keep up and putting the technology in their lives, I think it's really important to sort of talk to them and figure out what was easy about it, what was hard about it, how they were able to sort of stay current on it. Like, I think that's really instructive, especially for understanding where we came from and where we're going.
- [122:47]
D
That's all about need. Like my mom is no. No tech savvy at all. But she has a smartphone, she watches all her medias from YouTube, listens to podcasts, gets. Has email, email, that stuff. And I think it's just neat. Like she, she needed.
- [123:00]
Leo Laporte
She's still going to the bank or does she?
- [123:02]
D
No, she doesn't go to the bank. Well, my sister does all of her banking.
- [123:04]
Leo Laporte
When's the last time you got the check?
- [123:06]
Kathy Gellis
I just wrote a check again.
- [123:08]
Leo Laporte
Kathy, you're an outlier. You're a weirdo.
- [123:10]
Kathy Gellis
Well, I. So the. One of the reasons I do this stuff manually is I really want the accountability. I don't think the way digital processes have evolved, I don't think there's enough accountability. And I want to make sure that everything is working exactly the way I thought. And this check is written and it's getting deposited and it's a human. And I think that's unfortunate because it is unfortunate.
- [123:31]
Leo Laporte
It turns into bits. The. The. As soon as the bank possibly can turn that into bits.
- [123:38]
Kathy Gellis
I. I don't have any quarrel with that necessarily. I want the.
- [123:41]
Leo Laporte
Only at the first mile that that's a handwritten, anything goes, something immediately bits, and that's it.
- [123:47]
Kathy Gellis
And I need to debug this. I want to make sure that there's humans in this process and that there's.
- [123:51]
Leo Laporte
Paper trails, your checks back.
- [123:53]
Kathy Gellis
They send scans with my statements, which I get by mail because I want the. I also want the physical thing. So I reconcile and then I may store. And I just don't want it to be all electronic. It just feels too ephemeral and not accountable enough. And I think some of that accountability is, you know, failures of FTC and regulation because I think just too much can go too wrong. I was hoping that the technical revolution would actually bring more control and more accountability. And instead I feel like gone in the other direction.
- [124:25]
Leo Laporte
That's blockchain right there.
- [124:26]
Kathy Gellis
I don't need a full blockchain for this. I need sort of like contracts and consumer protection law.
- [124:31]
Leo Laporte
Like blockchain is. Everybody can see the contract. It's all public and everybody.
- [124:36]
Kathy Gellis
No, I mean, it doesn't need to be a technical solution. It's a human problem where there's not the accountability.
- [124:43]
Leo Laporte
And humans are the problem.
- [124:45]
Nicholas De Leon
Humans are often the problem.
- [124:46]
Leo Laporte
Are you kidding me? Humans are the problem.
- [124:49]
Kathy Gellis
Yeah. And I want. Right. Humans are a problem. And I want a human situation to the humans, you know, being scammed.
- [124:55]
Leo Laporte
Talk to them. Pretty soon you won't be talking to humans. In fact, this has become a problem for customer service reps. There was a story this week about customer service reps saying, people don't think we're human anymore. Everybody assumes we're AI.
- [125:13]
Kathy Gellis
I couldn't get Comcast to answer a question because their stupid chat app wouldn't let me ask the question and kept sending me in a loop, sending me in a loop, sending me in a loop. And you want to know. I go to the bank because I'm not in a loop. I know how to walk in the door and talk me to a teller.
- [125:26]
Leo Laporte
I had the same problem with audible. I got an email which went to spam. This is the problem with digital in late May. Actually, it's middle of the middle of the month in May, saying, we're going to your Audible account. Your Audible membership is no longer available. The one you use, the light listener, is no longer available. I've had it for 25 years. We're not going to do it anymore. So we're going to cancel it, but just because we like, like you, we're going to offer you a free year of the new account that you know you could have. I missed it. The first email I saw from Audible was a month later when they said, we've canceled your account. I said, I've been a member for 25 years. This is it. You cancel my account. So I went to the Audible page and it said, hey, good news. We're going to give you a free year. So I went into the chat interface face. Talk about a loop. They give you a choice of things you can say and it wasn't in there. And every time it said, no, you're cat. No, no. So I finally, I was able to get a hold of somebody and he said, no, no. That ran out May 31. I said, well, I didn't even know about it until June 16th when I got the cancellation. He said, sorry, you're out of luck.
- [126:44]
Nicholas De Leon
Another valued customer.
- [126:46]
Leo Laporte
25 years. We did ads for Audible for a decade. Decade. I probably responsible for hundreds of thousands.
- [126:53]
Nicholas De Leon
Of me over the years, for sure. I definitely subscribed using your code you see a couple times.
- [126:59]
Leo Laporte
No respect. I got no respect. It's fine. You know, I've been thinking, I've been trying to get out of the. Amazon has now become. There's an example of something that's changed a lot. Amazon has become this terrifying monopoly and it's very hard to get out of. They own Audible, of course. It's very hard to get out of the Amazon ecosystem. Audible, Cory Docter has been telling me this for years, has something like 90% market share of audiobooks, so much so that many of the books that I want to listen to are only available on Audible. There are other companies like Downpour and Libro fm, which sell audiobooks, but they don't have them all because Audible does these exclusives very often with the books I want. So they really got you locked in. And it's the same with Amazon. I'm trying to wean myself off of this. So when I say, what week is this week?
- [127:48]
Nicholas De Leon
Are you excitedly prime week? Amazon prime week.
- [127:51]
Leo Laporte
No, I'm not gonna buy anything. I don't care. I really. I still, I still. There's some things I can't get in town that I have to get on Amazon. I wish that weren't the case, but.
- [128:03]
Kathy Gellis
I just save it for the few things that I definitely need Amazon for. And if I can do it, I'm.
- [128:08]
Leo Laporte
Buying as little as possible. And I'M not gonna do anything and buy and I'm. I'm not gonna use Audible anymore because they apparently didn't want my business. So Libra. The nice thing About Libro is 10% of my subscription goes to my local bookstore. And you choose your local bookstore. But the day after I signed up in the newspaper, the little local newspaper, it said copperfields, our local bookstore, is going to close its used book department and get rid of 60% of its office space and fire a bunch of people because nobody's buying books at all anymore.
- [128:39]
Kathy Gellis
Oh, that's unfortunate. I've been to them. I've been to them.
- [128:42]
Leo Laporte
The one bookstore. Yeah.
- [128:44]
Kathy Gellis
But I think I went to them. I wanted to buy magazines and they're really hard to find anymore and I was hoping that I would find one.
- [128:52]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you really are old fashioned.
- [128:54]
D
The Copper Fields in San Rafael has a magazine section.
- [128:57]
Leo Laporte
They do.
- [128:58]
Kathy Gellis
Maybe that's where I ended up going eventually, but I think I tried the one in Nevado actually.
- [129:01]
Leo Laporte
If you're down in San Rafael, Book of Passage is the place. Place to go. That's the best.
- [129:05]
Kathy Gellis
I, I go there. I've bought books there. Yeah, I bought a book that I heard about on Blue sky and I ended up convincing my local library to order it, started to read it, didn't finish it and then went to Book Passage to order it or good.
- [129:22]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think it's nice to buy the books, but that's the other thing to do is get a Libby account or one of the other library accounts because you can get audiobooks. My local library has 42,000 audiobooks. Audiobooks. None of the Audible exclusives though really gets me.
- [129:36]
Kathy Gellis
I'm not really a process a book via listening. So I like, I like having that full book in my hand.
- [129:42]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, everybody's different. Yeah, Martin's right. He's. He says you can't get away from aws. Who was it? Was it Kashmir Hill? Somebody in the New York Times a couple years ago tried to de big tech her life and it was a disaster. Just couldn't do it.
- [129:58]
Nicholas De Leon
Pewdiepie just did a video a week ago on. He's.
- [130:00]
Leo Laporte
He's Linux.
- [130:02]
Nicholas De Leon
Yeah, he's like de Googling his. He got rid of Gmail, he's getting rid of his Android phone. He's really going all in.
- [130:08]
Leo Laporte
I think this is going to be the next thing. I think this is going to be the next thing is people are going to say just like they're going to be more like Kathy Gellis. They're going to start Writing checks. They're going to. I. I had this crazy thought and we'll see how this works out.
- [130:23]
Kathy Gellis
Out.
- [130:23]
Leo Laporte
I just bought from Framework which is I think a really good company. They make repairable laptops. They are making a desktop, an AI desktop now I just ordered an AI desktop from them, very high end. It's got 96 gigs of vram, 128 gigs of regular ram. Probably shared, but it's an AMD processor. I bought 8 terabytes of storage, SSD storage in the. So it's a kind of a beast of a. It's only as big as a banana, but it's a beast of machine. So I'm going to make that my home server, my home AI. I'm going to see if I can do local AI on it, my home server and then I'm going to turn all of these computers into thin clients. I'm not going to use commercial operating systems anymore. I'm just going to have one Linux system that I log into from all of my machines. We'll see how long that lasts.
- [131:15]
D
Like one failure is going to be pretty bad already. Like the first failure is going to be pretty bad. It'll take everything.
- [131:20]
Leo Laporte
Everything's backed up and everything. I like one of the first things I did when I left Audible get all. Download all my books, DDR them which you can do and then put them on my NAS so that I have them available everywhere. You know, I think there, I think there. I think this might be the next thing. We'll see. We'll see.
- [131:42]
Kathy Gellis
I think the issue is usability and how. Where you can get help to pull off these projects because it does take.
- [131:53]
Leo Laporte
I am the tech guy, remember. Yeah. So I will be the guinea pig, the canary in the coal mine. I will lead the charge over the hill and if, and then yeah, I'll start helping people do that because I think it's an interesting thing to attempt.
- [132:08]
Nicholas De Leon
I mean something. It's something we've discussed internally. I consume reports kind of like the public's almost exhaustion of like tech and yes, you know, it used to be cool, used to be fun. The iPhone. I remember when it came out. I remember that day. I remember Jobs announced it. Of course now it's like it's. It is. The shine is off, I guess you could say.
- [132:26]
Leo Laporte
And big tech has, has failed us, have they not.
- [132:29]
Nicholas De Leon
They've kind of sucked the fun out of this. I would.
- [132:31]
Leo Laporte
They've been shittified it.
- [132:32]
Nicholas De Leon
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's like, that's. Yeah.
- [132:35]
Kathy Gellis
I in the department of lameness. I'm sitting here looking at two laptops. I'm using my new laptop for the Zoom because it has the fewest things running on it. And the reason it has the fewest things running on is I've never gotten around to migrating from the old computer so I can start using the new one. It's supposed to be the one machine to rule them all and instead I'm like two fisting it.
- [132:56]
Nicholas De Leon
That's how it always is. That's literally. I have a nas. I was like, I'm going to move everything over to the nas. No, now I just have to install stuff.
- [133:04]
Leo Laporte
I am going to be the guy who makes this happen. Now there is a phone that I really want, the fair phone that I cannot buy in the US this is a repair terrible phone. Runs Android, runs the open source version of Android. You could de Google it if you want. It's completely repairable. I tried to buy it. You can't get it in the US.
- [133:29]
Kathy Gellis
Why not?
- [133:30]
Leo Laporte
I don't know. They don't offer it in the us.
- [133:32]
Kathy Gellis
I mean, will it have the right antenna where it can get on a US carrier?
- [133:36]
Leo Laporte
That's probably why.
- [133:37]
Kathy Gellis
In which case, if you acquire it, you may not be able to do anything. But I'm not sure that that's true because everything's gsme.
- [133:44]
Leo Laporte
Can you get one for me and I'll pay you you back? Martin's in Germany. Martin, get one, get me a fair phone and I'll. And I'll pay you back. It's €599. It's not cheap, but it's. It's not. It's not Apple and it's not Google.
- [134:00]
Nicholas De Leon
Well, it's still kind of.
- [134:02]
Leo Laporte
You can get de Googled Android, you can get aso, aosp, Android and then. And also you can replace the battery. So I'll.
- [134:13]
Kathy Gellis
Big is it?
- [134:14]
Leo Laporte
It's a little clunky. Martin's gonna get me one. Thank you, Martin. Martin's gonna get me one. Thank you, Martin. I appreciate it. I'll pay you back. Let's see what else is in the news. Oh, this is hysterical. Identities of. Well, this part's not hysterical. The next story after it, that's related. Identities of more than 80American tokens were stolen for North Korean IT workers scams. This has become a big problem in enterprise, which is North Korean tech workers posing as Americans secretly applying for remote tech jobs in the West. Initially we thought it was for the currency, you know, for US dollars. But now there seems to be some concern, concerned that they are doing it to spy and even to cause havoc. On Monday, the Department of justice announced a sweeping operation to crack down on the US Based elements of the North Korean remote IT workers scheme. Two Americans were indicted. Government says they were involved in the operations. There were also, and you have to do this, 29 laptop farms in 16 states. So these North Korea Koreans log in via VPN to these laptop farms in the US and then it looks like they're working out of the United States. The FBI seized 200 of the computers, 21 web domains, 29 financial accounts that received the revenue from the operation. The North Koreans didn't merely create fake IDs, they actually stole the identities of real Americans to impersonate them in jobs in more than 100 US companies, then funneling the hard dollars to the Kim regime.
- [136:06]
D
Okay, hold on, hold on. The people whose identities they stole from, they should get the money. They're the ones who should get the money back.
- [136:11]
Leo Laporte
So they're not doing the work. That's the funny thing is the North Koreans are doing the work. Yeah, they are doing the work.
- [136:17]
D
They should actually get paid.
- [136:18]
Leo Laporte
But, like, they should get paid.
- [136:19]
D
The stolen identities.
- [136:20]
Leo Laporte
The DOJ identified six Americans they believe were involved in a scheme to enable the North Korean tech worker in person. Only one of them has been arrested. They're doing the identity theft. And then they create shell account. Shell companies and shell bank accounts. So that ties into this story about somebody called Soham Parekh. This is from TechCrunch. Amanda Silberling, our good friend. Friend writing. Everyone in tech has an opinion about Soam Parek. Apparently TechCrunch is calling him the Anna Delvey of Silicon Valley. Apparently he's been interviewing and getting jobs at dozens of startups, mostly Y Combinator companies. He doesn't usually keep the job very long, but long enough to get, I guess, a paycheck check. There's a guy named Soam Parekh. He's in India, works three to four startups at the same time. Once a CEO tweeted about this. This week, Mixpanel CEO Suhail Doshi said, psa, there's a guy named Soham Parekh who works at three to four startups at the same time. Beware. He got started getting responses on Twitter. I fired this guy the first week and told him to stop lying and scamming people. He hasn't stopped. A year later, the Post has over 20 million views. Founders and investors from across the tech industry weighing in, apparently.
- [138:01]
Kathy Gellis
How is he getting his resume reviewed? By.
- [138:04]
Leo Laporte
He's apparently very, very good at interview questions.
- [138:10]
Kathy Gellis
Yeah, but it's not just that, like everybody's getting really frustrated looking for jobs because like no humans read the resumes. They just have AI process them and a lot of people are getting completely locked out.
- [138:22]
Leo Laporte
I actually know somebody. It's really a scam. There's a whole subreddit dedicated this called R over employed people who take 40 hour, multiple 40 hour a week jobs. They're not really putting in 40 hours a week, but they're remote so nobody knows, knows. Maybe they're working 10 hours, five hours a week and getting paid for 40. So they, you know, it's a, it's, I mean it's sketch.
- [138:51]
D
Question is, are they getting their work done?
- [138:53]
Leo Laporte
That.
- [138:53]
D
Are they getting their work done?
- [138:54]
Leo Laporte
They're getting the job done. Right.
- [138:55]
D
So, so what's the problem?
- [138:59]
Leo Laporte
Well, at some point there's going to be burnout, you're going to miss start missing meetings anyway.
- [139:04]
D
It's like trying to be a musician on the side. That's, that's nothing. They're a full time job.
- [139:07]
Leo Laporte
It's a husk. They're hustling wrestlers. Benito, anything you want to share with the class?
- [139:12]
D
I try to make music, I'm trying to make money on music on the side. Is that, is that not allowed? Like that's the same thing, right? Like that's a full time thing too.
- [139:19]
Kathy Gellis
No, he was, he was more worried that you were like, you know, producing this American life or something like that in your off time.
- [139:25]
Leo Laporte
You're not working for Joe Rogan, are you?
- [139:29]
D
Oh, no, no, sorry. No.
- [139:30]
Leo Laporte
Oh, okay. Whoa, that was a long pause. Okay. No, I'm just kidding. I love Berno. He's fine. Anyway, this guy apparently is very good at answering interview questions.
- [139:45]
Nicholas De Leon
Apparently one of the things that he did, he was just like cold email startups and was using very flattery language. Like I saw one of the. I just want to build. You guys are, he used all like the buzzwords. That's catnip to these guys. I just want to build. I, I just want to build 24 7. Your vision is just so compelling. And these startups. I know exactly. It's, it's, I mean to me I read that, I was like, that's like those all the hot singles in your area want to meet you and like you fall for that. But flattery will get you very far, I guess in Silicon Valley it's like.
- [140:16]
D
The dude who got hired by Zuckerberg, he's just really good at talking to Rich people.
- [140:20]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The X scale guy who apparently is getting hundreds of millions of dollars but who doesn't really have much to offer as far as AI engine engineering. Anyway, it's. Yeah, you know, it's an interesting question really. As long as the job gets done, what's wrong with it?
- [140:43]
D
That's how I feel. I mean, if you have two jobs and you're doing them, some people have to have two jobs. You know what I mean?
- [140:48]
Leo Laporte
Like, yeah, a lot of people do. All right, let's take one last, one last break. You're watching this Week in Tech with a great panel. Kathy Gellis is here. It's so good to have somebody who really knows the law to explain this stuff to us because, you know, most of we're, most of us were I nal and you know, we do our best but, but hearing the actual laws is always important and interesting. Nicholas De Leon is here. What do you write? What are you working on right now? Nicholas for consumer.
- [141:25]
Nicholas De Leon
Well, honestly, we had a lot of prime week stuff for this week, but I just published a thing. It may have gotten published today actually. I don't check the site on the weekends usually something about laptops and tariffs and like whether or not, you know, to what degree may they impact. It's, it's. The tariff stuff has been kind of non stop for a few weeks now. But a big tariff story and they redesigned the sites. Now you got to go to like.
- [141:48]
Leo Laporte
Oh, it's different, isn't it? Look at this.
- [141:50]
Nicholas De Leon
Yeah, you click more and then you click news and that's all articles.
- [141:56]
Leo Laporte
Okay. More and news. That's where, that's where you live. How to change a car tire. Did you write that one? Three Best Room Fans.
- [142:05]
Nicholas De Leon
Oh, I'm on page two. Okay.
- [142:07]
Leo Laporte
Oscar Meyer Turkey Bacon Recall. The best stand mixers of 2025. Best toilet bowl Clean. I love, by the way. Let me just go to my account because I've been member of Consumer Reports. Let me see if it says, I think it says somewhere how long I've been a member forever. I love Consumer Reports. Used to say maybe personal information don't show this because it's got my old home address. So that's.
- [142:36]
Nicholas De Leon
Yeah, I know they redid the site recently.
- [142:37]
Leo Laporte
They did. I can't. It's a membership overview. Maybe that's. No, gosh.
- [142:42]
Kathy Gellis
As opposed to Audible. Was membership over? Over.
- [142:45]
Leo Laporte
Membership over. Thank you. Audible. You know, that's the thing. I understand Audible. I was, I was grand. I can't say grandfathered anymore. I was legacied in at a lower rate. I got two books a month for 15 bucks and I. Maybe they were losing money, I don't know. But it was, it felt pretty abrupt after 25 years. Consumer Reports would never do that. That to me.
- [143:11]
Nicholas De Leon
I'm pretty sure we're not going to just cancel your account out of the.
- [143:14]
Leo Laporte
I don't think so. I've been a member forever since I, I think. Oh there it is said right at the top. Member since 2010. I think even longer than that.
- [143:24]
Nicholas De Leon
But I'm like the online stuff.
- [143:27]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Because I, I've been subscribing to the magazine since I got out of college.
- [143:32]
Nicholas De Leon
I mean it's almost 100 years old, the magazine. I know there's a, there's a big timeline in the office. I was just in the office about a month ago and there's a big timeline like oh, 1936, first issue.
- [143:41]
Leo Laporte
And they never took ads, right? They've never taken.
- [143:44]
Nicholas De Leon
Ever. Never. Never that.
- [143:46]
Leo Laporte
I honestly, I emulate them. I mean, well, we take ads. But what I do like Consumer Reports is I buy the things that we review. I don't, I don't take loaners. You guys buy the cars.
- [143:56]
Nicholas De Leon
You review the TV cars, refrigerators, the whole, the whole shebang.
- [144:00]
Leo Laporte
So it's amazing.
- [144:02]
D
Is it an endowment? Like how does co are there.
- [144:06]
Nicholas De Leon
There is some foundation. It's like a non profit. So it's that non profit world of.
- [144:10]
Leo Laporte
Like a lot of subscribers and they ask subscribers to donate, you know, so you can support them. And I, I absolutely happy to do it. It's. It's always been worth it. It's really good. And yes, there are people like Craig Newmark who support it. Philanthropy. Yep. It's a, it's a good organization. Anyway, we're very proud of you.
- [144:29]
Nicholas De Leon
You in a world I, I think you know, in a world of like AI slop and like all this like low quality like I look at YouTube and it's just like this. I mean there's a lot of stuff on YouTube, just generally speaking. But there's like a lot of, there's.
- [144:43]
Leo Laporte
A lot of slop out there. Absolutely.
- [144:44]
Nicholas De Leon
There's a lot. Which you know, maybe people like it. Who's.
- [144:47]
Leo Laporte
No, they don't.
- [144:47]
Nicholas De Leon
Who am I?
- [144:48]
Leo Laporte
And that's, I think that's the secret to our success. We've been doing this for 20 years. I really do think that's a secret to our success. And I, I know it's a secret to see our success. It's trust, trustworthy. You guys have integrity. I mean that's, that's a lot to be said for that.
- [145:01]
Nicholas De Leon
Yeah, that's the, that's the point of the organizations. Like we're, we're not engaged in any shenanigans. You know we're a little shenanigans methods.
- [145:09]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [145:10]
Nicholas De Leon
You know, you know we don't have. We don't the crazy cool tick tock kids, whatever. But, but you know, for information, you know I, I think we do a pretty good job.
- [145:18]
Leo Laporte
They're actually, it's interesting. I mean this site redesign is a big deal. You've got a lot of new like bill negotiator repair or replace. Is it worth repairing or replacing appliance. You've got ask CR expert advice that you guys are getting digital, you're getting hip, you're getting with it the ultimate guide to streaming.
- [145:36]
Nicholas De Leon
Yeah, we're not entirely ignoring the wider world but you know, we're not exactly, you know, I don't know. Bravo, whatever.
- [145:45]
Kathy Gellis
So sometimes you actually scan your checks instead of going to the bank.
- [145:51]
Leo Laporte
Five million members know it, know why we're there. One last break as I mentioned. I want to show you. This is actually something. I didn't buy this. They sent it to me because they're a sponsor. But we've been using it for I think eight years now. This is my. Let me, let me show you. This is my Thinkst Canary. This thing. Look at that. It looks like a little USB external drive. Right. But you could tell it's not because it's got an Ethernet connection and power. What is that? Well, it's anything I want it to be. That's a Thinks Canary. It's a honeypot that can impersonate pretty much anything from a Windows server, a Linux server, a nas. This is, I think a Windows server right now. I can actually change it. That's one of the cool things. Let me log into my account at Canary Tools and I'll and I'll show you because it's so easy to make this be anything you want to be now. A bad guy who breaks into your network. This is the point of this is it's a honeypot in your network. You might have all the perimeter protections you could possibly imagine. But what, how do you know if somebody's inside your network? These bad guys are very good at covering their tracks. They, they weasel their way in and then they wander around. On average companies don't know they've been breached for 91 days. Days. That's three months. A bad guy could be in your network and you don't know it. Exfiltrating company proprietary information, looking up customer records, and of course looking for places that they could set off time bombs for ransomware. So that's why you need Thinks canaries. Two things I can do. This is my Thinks canary. I'll show you this right now. It, yeah, it's a Windows Server, Windows 2019, Office 5. But it could be a lot of different things. Just look at the dropdowns here. I can be IIS, some Windows 10, Windows, Linux proxy file share from Mac OS X, a Citrix gateway, a Dell switch. It can even be a SCADA device. Like I could be right now a Rockwell Automation PLC or a Siemens Simatic 300 PLC. And by the way, when it impersonates those, it changes the Mac address to Mac match the company so that you know, you know, a bad guy looking at this doesn't, doesn't see a honey pot. They see something that looks absolutely real. You could set this up. I'm going to throw that change out. I will show you the other thing you can do with it, which is to create files or Canary tokens as they call this. These can be files. It could be almost anything. You can even have it be a credit card number, an Excel document document. You can have it be a VPN configure file, almost anything, a QR code. But the minute somebody access it, if somebody, somebody accesses it, if somebody uses this credit card, for instance, it won't work, but I will get an alert. And that's the beauty of the things Canary. You get only the alerts that matter. If there's a bad guy in your network, if somebody is accessing those Canary tokens, those Lore files are trying to brute force your fake internal SSH server. Your thinks Canary will immediately tell you you've got a problem. No false alerts, just the alerts that matter. And by the way, any way you want them. Email, text, syslog, they support web hooks. You could have it coming through Slack, you could have it. There's an API any way you want, or all of them. But when you get that alert, you know there's somebody in my network. And that's the time you want to know that the minute they get there and start accessing stuff. Choose a profile for your devices I showed you. Very easy to do. Literally takes seconds. Register with a hosted console for monitoring and notifications. Then you sit back and relax. Attackers who breached your network or malicious insiders and other adversaries cannot help but make themselves known by accessing your things To Canary. Visit Canary tools twit. For 7,500 bucks a year, you get five things Canaries, your own hosted code console, upgrades, support and maintenance. If you use the Code Twit in the how did you hear about us? Box, 10% off for life. You can always return your Thinks Canary. You've got a two month money back guarantee for a full refund. During all the years we've partnered with Thinks Canary, that refund has never been claimed. Visit Canary Tools Twit. Enter the code Twit in the how did you hear about us but Box. The nice thing about the Things Canary is it just sits there quietly until you need to pay attention. Then you can sit up and take notice. I love this thing. Canary Tools slash Twit. Don't forget that offer. Go twit for 10% off for life. Thank you. Thanks Canary. Love this thing. I guess Elon is looking at other ways to make money. The Tesla Tesla empire starting to look a little ragged. So Star now we use Starlink here as a fail back. I have Starlink running, so if Comcast fails, which it does all the time by the way, it'll fail over the ubiquity router. It'll say oh, and it'll fail over. And we're not down for more than a few seconds. But if you were to sign up for Starlink in certain areas. Get ready. In some states like Washington, if you sign up for Starlink, you're going to have a $750 congestion charge in addition to the regular startup costs. It's expensive to start up because you got to buy the equipment. I think it's. We have business class services, maybe a hundred bucks a month. It's not hugely expensive, but if you're a new Starlink user there's a big congestion charge and I wonder why this is. It isn't a good solution. I have to say it's not. I was hopeful when Starlink was announced they're going to put 10,000 low earth orbit satellites up that it was going to give the entire globe access to the Internet, no matter where you are. For cheap. It ain't cheap. And I think we're learning that it is also very limited in how many people can serve and polluting because of all rocket launches.
- [152:18]
Kathy Gellis
Well, not just the failures, but it's hard to do astronomy now. There's a lot of.
- [152:25]
Leo Laporte
Right. Light pollution. Right. Yeah. Anyway, that's a little disappointing.
- [152:32]
Nicholas De Leon
We've got Starlink here. I'm a little. A little bit ISO. There's no Other Internet options.
- [152:37]
Leo Laporte
You have to. But it's been working great for you. Look at that. You had. You have a better connection than I do.
- [152:42]
Nicholas De Leon
It maxes out around like 260 megabits a second, which is. Which is fine. I mean, it. Could it be fast? You know, I've had faster connections.
- [152:49]
Leo Laporte
But do you get all your TV over the top? Everything on the.
- [152:53]
Nicholas De Leon
Yeah. What? HBO Max. You know, the whole. All the. The MLB app. The F1 this morning was in 4K flawless. So we've got a bunch of neighbors. They've got, you know, the RVs, and they're currently traveling the country, going to, like, all the national parks. They'll have Starlink, the portable Starlink.
- [153:09]
Leo Laporte
It's not the cheap solution, but it does work. And it does work everywhere. Pretty much everywhere.
- [153:14]
Kathy Gellis
But to get back to that case that we were talking about, Cox v. Sony, let's say that somebody sent a bunch of bogus takedown notices to Starlink and said that Nicholas De Leon is totally infringing without those. Without those claims ever being tested in court. All of a sudden, you look like a repeat infringer to Starlink. And Starlink has to have a policy to turn you off, even though, as you just said, you have no other place to go.
- [153:41]
Nicholas De Leon
Yeah, so that's.
- [153:43]
Kathy Gellis
That's an issue that's basically now queued up for the Supreme Court to weigh in on.
- [153:46]
Leo Laporte
Without Internet access, you wouldn't be able to work.
- [153:51]
Nicholas De Leon
No, I would not. Yeah, I would have to figure something.
- [153:53]
Leo Laporte
Out, go into town or something.
- [153:55]
Kathy Gellis
I mean, it's a problem, even if you were legitimately pirating something, that a couple of takedown notices would do it. But the fact that accusation only and they never need to be tested can take you down because it's putting pressure on the intermediary where they're going to end up potentially liable for the copyright claims if they don't kick you off. So they're going to kick you off. So this is bad. This is. The DMCA has big problems, and we've just been turning a blind eye to it for a quarter of a century or more.
- [154:26]
Nicholas De Leon
I mean, I remember when the DMCA was first, I used to read 2600 magazine. Like, these guys were, like, against the DMC, like, for my whole. My whole adult life. Longer than that. And it's still funny that we're still dealing with this bad law. It's. It's very. It's very American, I guess.
- [154:44]
Leo Laporte
You know, it's not American. An interesting development in India. Foxconn has been building a plant, actually has a plan in operation now to build iPhones in India. India. Apple, of course, very much interested in getting iPhones built outside of China due to tariffs. Well, China may be getting involved in the Indian plant. More than 300 Chinese iPhone engineers and technicians have been recalled from the Foxconn plant. Suspicion falling on the Chinese government, which may in fact and has in the past past. There's a great book called Apple in China which documents this. Has in the past messed with Apple. Apple declined to comment. Foxconn didn't respond to a request for comment. But it does fit according to 9 to 5 Mac, a pattern of Chinese interference with Apple's plan to diversify outside of the country. Actually, if you think about it, that makes perfect sense. Sense, right? The the number of made in India iPhones was expected to more than double this year. Apple moving a lot of production to India. In fact, it's been widely reported they have a goal of making 25% of iPhones worldwide in India by next year or the year after. Maybe not. We can't forget China has pretty much an iron grip on on its companies. I don't know what to say about that. We will talk about the new iPhone rumors, lots of them. New iPhone is probably already in production right now in China. And on Tuesday, Mac Break Weekly, we'll talk about all the rumors about the iPhone 17 and the new iOS 26. That's what we cover on Mac Break Weekly. Mr. Nicholas de Leon, congratulations again. Again. I hope that Starlink never cuts off and that your.
- [156:50]
Nicholas De Leon
That would be very inconvenient.
- [156:51]
Leo Laporte
Yes. Improves forever. And give, give my best to Ashley. Very happy for both of you. That's exciting. Lisa and I will be there in December. Even if you don't invite us. We're just going to come down. I'm just going to stand outside the door.
- [157:03]
Nicholas De Leon
That's fine.
- [157:04]
Leo Laporte
Holding cake. Thank you. Great to see you. Senior electronics reporter at the legendary Consumer Reports. Also of course, the wonderful Kathy Gellis, contributor at tech dirt. Cgcouncil.com did we say everything we needed to say about all of these SCOTUS decisions? Is there anything, was there anything on the docket we should be watching for? How about that?
- [157:30]
Kathy Gellis
The so all those, all those cases will have a part two to it, but the one that will be interesting actually the Coxby Sony, because that isn't a decision, that is just them granting cert. So they're going to hear the case.
- [157:46]
Leo Laporte
So this will be till when?
- [157:50]
Kathy Gellis
So in theory, the briefs will be at the moment the briefs are due in August, although I wonder if there might be an extension in which case. But they'll be due sometime this term, probably this year, and then they'd probably have oral argument over the winter, and then there would be a decision by next spring. So that is definitely watchable. And actually one other thing to highlight, and I had not called attention to it before because I was sort of afraid that if I did, the Supreme Court wouldn't grant cert in this case. But one of the reasons that they did grant the cert was that they. They looked at the petitions from Cox and Sony and then asked the Solicitor General to file an amicus brief. And this happened during the Biden administration, where they asked for it, and then it was pretty clear that it was going to get written by the Copyright Office. But the brief eventually got written and submitted. And it is a great brief. It is the single most First Amendment forward thing that I could ever imagine this Trump administration producing. And I really think they probably have no idea that they've actually just done this. And it's an absolutely fantastic brief.
- [159:03]
Leo Laporte
Is that one lawyer in the White House who's a pretty good lawyer?
- [159:06]
Kathy Gellis
No, I mean, I think. I think, think it was correct that this brief was probably written by the Copyright Office who knows the material.
- [159:12]
Leo Laporte
But even though he fired the Librarian.
- [159:14]
Kathy Gellis
Of Congress, what was interesting is that brief seems to have been written and then irrespective of that firing, then the Solicitor General, who's now D. John Sauer, I guess his name is, and he put his name and his team's name to it and they filed it. It's a really good brief.
- [159:31]
Nicholas De Leon
Did they fire.
- [159:32]
Leo Laporte
Didn't though. They fire her.
- [159:34]
Kathy Gellis
They fired. Fired Pearl Mother, but. Or. And she's suing to try to get her job back, but somehow in the.
- [159:40]
Leo Laporte
Chaos, she had anything to do with it. And was it anything.
- [159:44]
Kathy Gellis
It's a great brief. I'm sure that in her tenure, the brief was largely written and drafted and then it just managed to escape and get out the door and get. And get. Without being stopped by anybody. It didn't get stopped in the Copyright Office. It didn't get stopped by the Trump administration. They put the Solicitor General, put his name on it and sent it into the court. But it was. I need to maybe read it more closely and write about it. It was really good brief and it influenced the court to. To take the case. It. It was basically Cox take Cox's case up and, oh, Sony also had a cert petition and it was basically saying, don't give Sony's cert, but do give Cox's. And that's exactly what the court did. So something good happened, but I have no idea how it happened. But that amicus brief is.
- [160:26]
Leo Laporte
Was already found liable by a jury in 2019 and it's a billion dollars in damages. This is the appeal of that.
- [160:35]
Kathy Gellis
Yeah, part of it.
- [160:36]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So this will be very interesting to watch. Is an ISP liable for the actions of its users?
- [160:43]
Kathy Gellis
But it's a lot of stuff to really get some eyes on secondary liability. Even though the DMCA issues aren't really on the table, I think they can get squeezed in. I think it's got a First Amendment component to it. I really think that this is all hands on deck for the Internet industry and not just the copyright players.
- [161:02]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. First Monday in October. Do they. Will they do shadow docket stuff between now and then?
- [161:07]
Kathy Gellis
Oh, the way. Should they? No. Are they. Absolutely. Given the way they've proceeded, yeah.
- [161:14]
Leo Laporte
Thank you, Kathy. Great to have you. I can guarantee you we'll have you back at least when. When that case gets argued, if not sooner. Thank you, Kathy Gallis. Thanks to all of you who watch. A special thanks to our Club Twit members who make all of our shows possible. You now subsidize 25% of our operating costs and without you, we would not be able to do what we do. But we try to reward you and we're so glad you're members of the club. Club twit members pay 10 bucks a month, 120 bucks a year. There are family plans. There are corporate plans. There's also, I think, a two week free trial if you want to just see what it's like you get for that ad. Free versions of all the shows. Because you're paying us, we don't need to play ads for you. Tracker free too. There's no. Absolutely, absolutely private feeds. Each member gets their own private feed. You also get access to the wonderful club Twit Discord, which is a great place to hang out and all the special events we do in the Club Twit Discord. I mentioned that music event. That was fantastic. If you are a member of the club, you'll find that on the Twit plus feed. We also have our AI users group coming up Friday. That's going to be right after Chris Markle monthly photo visit. Our assignment this month is quirky. Get out and take a quirky photo, Nicholas, and submit it to Flickr so that we can review all those photos on July 11th. That's at 1pm and then the AI user group following immediately at 2pm of course we do all of the keynotes now in the club to avoid being taken down on YouTube. Oh, Stacy's book club has been booked August 8th. Very interesting book. This is how youw Lose the Time War. Not too late to join that. Read it and join the book club in August. So there's lots of programming dedicated. We'll do. Yes, we're going to do another coffee one. Somebody said, are you doing more coffee stuff? Mark Prince, our coffee guru, will absolutely come back and do some more coffee. We'll talk more about music. I think that was a lot of fun. We've got Micah's crafting corner where he does crafts. There's lots of stuff in the club. We try to make it as interesting, as compelling as possible because it's so important. Important, frankly, to our survival. We really appreciate it. Thank you club members for your support. Because of the club members, we're able to stream when we do this show every Sunday 2 to 5pm Pacific, 5 to 8pm Eastern, 2100 UTC on eight different platforms. The club Twit, Discord, of course that's the behind the velvet rope access. But there's also for the public at large, you can watch it. YouTube, Twitch, Tick Tock, Facebook Live, LinkedIn, X.com and Kick and all of those. If you got chat there, we'll see the chat. I'm watching a unified chat that everybody's in there. Hi Arnold and Ken and terrible username in our YouTube chat. Martin of course in Germany there in our YouTube chat. We appreciate that watch live but you don't have to after the fact. On demand versions of the show available at TWiT TV. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to this week. Week in tech. Great place to go to share little clips if you want to do that. Help spread the word. Of course the best way to get any of our shows is to subscribe in your favorite podcast player. Every show has an audio or video feed or you can get both if you want. But do subscribe. That way you'll get them automatically as soon as the show's ready for you. And if your podcast client has reviews, please leave us a five star review. Spread the the word. That makes a big difference too in an audience and listenership. It's a little hard when we, you know, we've been doing this show for 20 years. We're not the flavor of the month. We're not the hot new thing. We're not Joe Rogan but we have a wonderful community and I'm really grateful to each and every one of you. Thank you for all your support. And as I've said for 20 years, and I hope to say, continue to say for the next 20 years, thanks for being here. We'll see you next time. Time. Another twit is in the can. Amazing.